


all the while, you belong to me

by formerly_known_as___REDACTED



Category: The Turning (2020)
Genre: Age Difference, Angst and Feels, Attempted Murder, Awkward Blow Jobs, Awkward Tension, Canon Remixed, Canonical Character Death, Consensual Underage Sex, Creepy Behavior, Crying, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Exhibitionism, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Face Slapping, Graphic Description, Graphic Description of Past Child Sexual Abuse, Graphic Description of Past Grooming, Graphic Description of Past Physical Abuse, Hand Jobs, I'm Going to Hell, I'm Sorry, Kate Has Wine, Letters, Masturbation, Miles plays the piano, Non-Consensual Touching, Not Suitable/Safe For Work, Obsessive Behavior, Older Woman/Younger Man, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Third Person, Present Tense, Public Groping, Public Masturbation, References to Child Sex Trafficking, References to Childhood Sexual Abuse, Sexual Fantasy, Slow Burn, Smoking, Surprise Kissing, Teacher-Student Relationship, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Underage Masturbation, Unhealthy Relationships, Unreliable Narrator, Vomiting, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:07:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 16
Words: 28,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26687140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/formerly_known_as___REDACTED/pseuds/formerly_known_as___REDACTED
Summary: that’s the first thing she sees, those blushing lips gaping into a fat heart and plumped up around his rapid boy-breath, his big black eyes steadied by a preternatural composure(Miles turns 17 in the course of this fic)
Relationships: Miles Fairchild/Kate Mandell
Comments: 107
Kudos: 68





	1. languor

**Author's Note:**

> you can listen to the song [here](https://youtu.be/IoKb5JVg4wA)

At night, sometimes, when it’s very quiet, Kate can hear Miles downstairs playing the piano---when she’s awake, her restlessness dug all the way in, eyes darting from corner to corner, the way they’d move if she was asleep, rapid and shaking her way through a dream---and her lips will move around the shapes of lyrics: _see the pyramids along the Nile, watch the sunrise on a tropic isle. Just remember, all the while. You belong to me_.

Miles doesn’t sing.

He plinks notes in place of words.

He’s languid. He herds the tune until it ripples along. With her eyes closed, she sees his white spider hands, those long lingering fingers, and she’ll hold still for that image; his cadence fills her with thoughts of water disturbed, of calm undone by a hesitant touch. She’ll lie on her back, her skin forgotten, her sweat abloom, her forehead tight until his meandering comes. It flows through her, leaves the sun-warmed taste of clean minerals in her mouth.

_Fly the ocean in a silver plane. See the jungle when it’s wet with rain_.

He’ll play the song all the way through, once. Twice and a third time if it’s very late, if she’s very lucky, if he’s certain there’s no one left awake, if she’s tricked him into complacency with her silence.

_Just remember, when a dream appears. You belong to me_.

If she holds her breath, if there’s no other weather happening anywhere, if the ambience is completely still, she can hear his stern breaths.

The bench scrapes the wood.

“Just remember, darling, all the while,” Kate murmurs, her voice scratchy and thin, her eyes wandering the canopy, her trembling fingers clutching the duvet: “You belong to me.”

_Clunk_ goes the piano, allowed to sleep at last.

_Click_ go the light switches, ushering in the dark.

_Creak_ goes that one stair, unable to keep any sort of dynamic weight a secret.

Kate closes her eyes.

Finds her breath.

Falls asleep.


	2. a dream appears

The gasp comes first.

Black explodes into red-dappled darkness and movement outside her body sweeps dwindling dream fragments into afterthought. Her bed feels wrong. There’s a tickling on her cheek.

Her hand escapes the blankets at lightning speed. She slaps narrow bone, fingers circling around a spastic wrist.

The parting of Miles’s lips occupies the same second as her eyes flying open---that’s the first thing she sees, those blushing lips gaping into a fat heart and plumped up around his rapid boy-breath, his big black eyes steadied by a preternatural composure---he’s motionless the way an animal would be, held still, his thin torso adrift in a big red gnawed-upon sweater.

“What?” She hugs the blankets with one bent wrist, places too much emphasis on the _t_. Her eyes narrow. “Can’t you knock?”

He studies her, his mouth too dazed to close.“Your light is still on,” he mumbles, shrugs one shoulder. “So I figured you’d be awake.”

“But I’m not.” Kate’s words come out shrill, waspish. She lets go of him. “Why did you touch me?”

“There was a spider on your face.”

Kate pulls back, glances at his proffered hand. On his palm is a tiny black hairy thing. She watches it scuttle over his splayed fingers.

“See, it coulda woken you up anyways.” Miles clenches his fingers, the corners of his mouth twitching into a brief grimace. His eyes slide up to hers. “There.”

Heat builds between Kate’s skin and the pile of messed-up bedclothes. “Am I supposed to thank you?”

Miles blinks the vacancy from his face. “I don’t know.”

“Well.” Kate tucks her naked shoulders under the sheet. “Did you want something, then?”

He lowers himself to the edge of the bed. She wraps the sheet tight around her chest. The big floppy collar of the red sweater pulls taut along his bent spine, dips below his neck. He hangs his head. Her gaze shifts to his bared skin, watches the warm copper light pulse up his milky way trail of freckles, cup a smooth archipelago of vertebrae; it scatters a red glaze across the gleam of his skin, conjures filmy shadow-fingers in his hair. He gives her his profile.

Kate flattens her lips, breathes out through her nose.

Miles’s voice slides out, deepens. Turns soft. “You don’t like me, do you?”

“No, that’s…” She shakes her head and her voice trails off. “Uh...I wouldn’t.” Kate’s lips twitch into a brief, demure smile. Her voice softens. “I wouldn’t say that.”

He flexes his forearms, digs the heels of his palms into the mattress. His fingers curl up. “Do you want me to apologize?”

“I think you should.”

Miles draws in a ponderous breath. His words come out enunciated, flat, strung out between half-breaths of silence: “But do you _want_ me to?”

“Yes. I do.”

He turns and there’s a gleam in his big black eyes, keen but restrained, humming like a hand gripping a too-sharp knife; it’s the hesitation of a soft tender soul faced with a small but necessary murder. Kate shrinks underneath the steadiness of that gaze.

A ping of heat creeps down her lower spine.

“But you’re not sorry.” Her voice hardens until it cracks. “Are you?”

He sways. Her eyes widen and there’s an urge to sit up but she finds him so close, too close, moving over her slow as a storm, his eyes tracking hers. He traps warmth between them. Blots out all red-filtered light. Dazed, her muscles fall into stupor. He leans onto his hands and pours his hot unsteady breath all over her chin; she freezes, hyperventilates, her mind beating frantic wings.

His lips find the borders of hers, skirt them.

She mouths the sudden rush of her own erratic breath, strains her throat toward the shape of his name.

His face free-falls.

Kate’s throat cords knot together, snuff out a soft startled noise. His mouth lands hard, bursts open; he’s wet and thick as overripe fruit, sweet on the inside, lips raw and soft as velvet. Her muscles strum to life but the inside of her head spins with too much heat. His mouth bears down. Her hands float up, drop back. He goads her lips into a languid rhythm; scattershot breaths erupt from her nose. Her blood slides into a stunned tide. Weakened, her hands climb their way toward fistfuls of sweater.

His tongue’s warm softness breaches her mouth and Kate lets go, slaps him hard across the face.

Miles flinches. He pushes back and glances at her mouth, one hand drifting up, his fingers groping at the sting.

Kate blinks several times, scrubs the spit off her mouth, stares back. Her chest heaves.

His overripe lips tremble, twitch into a wavering baroque line. His chin quivers. His eyes narrow.

Miles backhands her.

Pain flashes through her skin, scatters sparks down her neck muscles. It loosens her jaw. Kate’s mouth gapes. “Miles!”

He blinks, moves back, lets out a startled breath.

“You need to go to bed.” She glares. “Now.”

His body jerks but he doesn’t move; he holds her gaze, bright red patches flaring hot across his cheekbones, his swollen mouth slack at the corners.

Kate tilts her head.

His forehead twitches. His breath stutters. He makes a brief pained ecstatic face. His eyes darken. He breathes faster. He bites his lip.

She looks down.

He’s leaning toward her, one hand curled between sprawled thighs, palming the thick ridge of his hard cock through his loose corduroy pants.

A blast-summer furnace of heat ripples through her, warps sight into shimmer.

Miles lowers his eyelashes, studies her face. He wraps his fingers around the jutting shape of the head. He squeezes. His breath rushes out, stutters a little, speeds up. His flushed lips twitch toward the shape of a smile.

Kate's belly cramps around a spill of breath. Her spine goes all swoony and she curls over her thighs, her arms wrapped around her middle, her throat aching.

His eyelids flutter shut. His lip curls and then his mouth opens; he squeezes harder, upper lip twitching away from his teeth.

“Go to bed!” Her face pounds with heat. “Now!”

His eyebrows knot. He utters a strangled groan.

“Miles!” Kate squeezes her eyes shut. “ _Stop_ it!”

He gasps and there’s a rustling, a fidgety shifting. The mattress springs back at the liftoff of his weight.

“I’m sorry,” he whimpers.

Her eyes burn. “Get out!”

His voice dwindles. “Kate…”

“I said _go_!” Her whole body springs open. She shoves her foot against the side of his thigh. “ _Get out_!”

“Okay, okay.” His voice wavers, cracks. “Jesus.” He pulls in a chestful of vehemence. “Fine!”

Kate yanks the covers up over her head and shouts through a faceful of wool and brocade, her voice agonized: “And close the door!”

He slams it.


	3. shiver

It’s a bitter day at the coast; out past the unsteady water, the horizon is still shrouded in fog. The sky hangs low, thick and filmy, a whitening gray. A constant wind peels raw off the back of a numbing ocean. 

Kate huddles inside the phone booth. She listens to the line ring once, twice, three times. She fights back an onslaught of shivering.

“This is Rose’s assistant, how may I help you?”

Kate grins, but it feels disconnected from the rest of her body. “Hey.”

“Katie! What’s up?”

Rose’s voice sounds warm and uncluttered; Kate imagines her sitting at their kitchen table and surrounded by work, city-stained light filtering in through the blinds.

“It’s great to hear your voice.”

“Oh boy.” The silliness drops out of Rose’s voice. “What’s wrong?”

Kate’s vision blurs. “It’s...the brother.” She forces her mouth into the shape of a smile. Hot tears slide down her cheeks. “He’s not going back to boarding school, I mean…”

“What did I say about letting him get under your skin?”

“I’m working on it, but it’s not that easy.” Kate sniffles, wipes her nose. “He’s a little shit.”

“How old is he again?”

Kate makes a pained face. She wipes her mouth, closes her eyes. “Sixteen.”

“Such a delightful age.”

“Yeah.” Kate snorts, wipes her face. “Not really.”

“Did you talk to the headmaster like I told you?”

“Yeah, I did.” Kate hooks hair behind one ear. “I tried to plead a case but...nada, nothing.” She makes a face, twists her voice into a high-pitched tone. She mimics an English accent: “Why, they absolutely decline.”

“Wow, that’s harsh.”

“I couldn’t get them to tell me whether there had been other incidents because...well, I’m not the mother, right?” Kate shakes her head and half-laughs, half-cries. “Never mind that she’s dead and they _know_ she’s dead.”

“Hmmm, seems overboard to me to expel a kid over a single incident. I’ve heard of kids doing a lot worse than that and ending up with...I dunno, detention? A stern parent-teacher conference?”

“Yeah! I know!”

Rose pauses. “Hey.” Her voice softens. “You wanna bail, don’t you?”

“Yeah...no…” Kate shakes her head. “Kind of?” She closes her eyes, sighs. “I mean, yes and no.” She hangs her head. Her voice loses strength. “I don’t know.”

“He’s making you cry, Katie Elizabeth.” Rose’s voice is stern. “Admitting defeat is an okay thing.”

“It’s not--- _he’s_ not---” Kate’s flattened mouth twitches and she slaps the spiderwebbed cloudy glass, utters a frustrated snarling noise. “I don’t think it’s him, though, I think it’s _me_ , I should be better at this.” She blasts a harsh breath out through her nose. “I _am_ better than this, I just…”

“Feel sorry for him?”

“No.” Kate shakes her head. “Well...yes, of course I do, I mean, he’s an orphan and I’m not a total monster.”

“Not a total monster?” Rose laughs. “You’re not a monster at all, you mean! Come on, Kate. Finding a behaviorally challenged teen boy a little difficult to deal with doesn’t make you a monster.”

“He’s a lot difficult, but…” She takes a deep breath, lets it out. “That isn’t the point.”

“What is, then?”

“I think I’m just…” Kate starts to laugh and she reins it in, coughs it out. “Lonely and isolated, this place, Rosie, I mean it’s fucking...desolate, this is some real backwoods crap. There’s no other staff.” The wind hits the phone booth, rattles nearby rigging; the distant chiming of a buoy drowns in a roar of waves. “The only adult I speak to on any sort of regular basis is an actual reanimated mummy.”

Rose bursts out snickering.

“But she _is_!” Kate peers around the glass, gets a faceful of cold air. She winces. “I mean I swear to god she came over on the Mayflower.”

“Rude!”

Kate shivers. “She’s like a hundred years old.”

“I seem to recall warning you about this. The whole north forty problem, that is.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Kate pulls her hand into her sleeve, grips the phone with it. “I know, I remember.”

“So it’s all work and no play, then?” Rose chuckles, clicks her tongue. “Making Katie a very _weepy_ girl indeed?”

“Yeah.” Kate’s face reddens. She utters a short bitter laugh. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“So did you try going through the social worker? Or counselor, or doctor, or whoever the school employs to take care of student mental health issues?”

“I did, yeah, but she was...not sympathetic.” Kate huddles against the back of the booth. Her eyes follow the quick-walking shapes of people on the sidewalk. “And she wouldn’t tell me anything, either.”

“Have you tried talking to _him_?”

Kate’s stomach clenches. Her breath stops; a burst of adrenaline shakes its way into her muscles, cranks up her heart rate. She sweats under her clothes. 

“What’s his name, again?”

“Miles.” She swallows the shake out of her voice. Her cheeks burn. “His name is Miles.”

“Well, have you tried talking to Miles about his behavior?”

“Of course I have.” Kate’s lips thin. “He just…does not listen.” She laughs and it sounds manic; she claps a hand over her mouth. “I mean,” she goes on, taking a breath, clearing her throat, “he is the princely prince of Bly Manor and he doesn’t _have_ to, don’t you know?” Her voice frays. “Rules are for peasants!” She closes her eyes, massages her forehead. “They don’t apply to little princelings such as himself.”

“Whoa.”

Kate’s eyes open. “What?”

Rose whistles. “You sure you don’t wanna bail?”

“No, I don’t know.” Kate sighs. “But there’s Flora, too, and I was hired to teach her. The snotty brother is just a...a-a shitty door prize.” 

“Are your teeth chattering?”

A fresh shiver twists up Kate's spine. “I’m on a payphone down by the harbor.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake. Go get warm. You’ll make yourself sick.”

“This is the only way I can get any privacy.”

“So go home and write me a letter. It’s slower but it’s warmer. What are you going to do when it's real winter?”

Kate hugs herself. Her eyes sting. “I don’t know.”

“Buy a thicker coat, at least.”

“I need some decent gloves, too.” Kate laughs and it’s too high-pitched, loose, untethered. “My fingers are numb.”

“I am hanging up now, Katherine. Go home and get in the tub or something.”

“Okay.” Kate’s smile wavers. “Thanks.”

Rose’s voice softens. “Take care of yourself, all right?”

Kate nods. “I will, I promise.”

"Good."


	4. wet with rain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can listen to the version kate's listening to in the car [here](https://youtu.be/zQfF84ackMM)

Kate hangs up, pulls both hands inside her coat sleeves, dashes to her car.

She flings open the door, climbs in. 

Slams it shut. 

“Fuck,” she hisses, one hand diving down into her coat pocket. The keys rattle. With numb fingers, she fumbles one of them into the ignition. “When did it get so fucking cold?”

She pushes in the clutch, cranks the key. The engine rumbles. The vents roar to life.

“Come on, come on.” She turns the heat all the way up. “Let’s go, kick in, I’m freezing my tits off.” 

Fat raindrops scatter across the windshield.

“Really?” Kate leans forward, peers up through the windshield. She flicks on the wipers; their steady rhythmic thump slices the murmur of water into chunks. “Are you serious?”

The rain picks up. Wind gusts behind it, drums droplets on the roof. Thick rivulets slither down the glass; they bend the weakened light, blur the outlines of things.

“Well...okay.” Kate rolls her eyes. “I guess you are, then.”

The heat kicks in.

“Oh thank God.” She puts the car into gear. “Time to go.”

Kate turns on the stereo, shoves the tape into the deck. A flourish of gilded horns, followed by a chorus of backup girls, spills out of the speakers; genteel and polished, muted with time, an orchestral swaying bears up the beginning slide of a female voice: heavy velvet, distilled into the smoothest notes, the woman on the tape delivers the lyrics with a sugared dose of forties-style swagger. She turns the car around, feels the dash, nudges up the volume.

“See the pyramids along the Nile…” Kate makes her voice low and husky. “Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle…”

She glances in the rearview, watches the road back to the manor fade into the rain. Her car warms up, cuts into the windshield fog as she rolls through downtown, creeps along, stops for the roaming knots of pedestrians; they huddle under umbrellas, dash across the street.

“...but just remember, darling...all the while...you belong to me…”

Though it’s well into the off-season, most of the little boutiques are still open in anticipation of holiday shopping. 

“...see the marketplace in old Algiers...and send me photographs and souvenirs…”

A few of the restaurants are still open, too, but the clam and lobster roll shacks have been shuttered tight against the cold and most of the upscale places, tiny and elegant and shoved into the bottom floors of old buildings, have darkened windows.

“...just remember, when a dream appears...you belong to me.”

Kate sings herself out of town. 

To her left runs a string of modest but misleading homes; the land they sit on is worth an easy fortune. Their windows stare across the road and through the trees, seek out views of rough pinkened rocks, breaking waves, shrieking gulls.

When the song ends, she clicks the stereo off. 

This stretch of road is smooth. Heat blows her hair out of her face, sinks into the tip of her nose. She flexes her knuckles. Her fingertips start to thaw. Kate soothes the silence in her mind with a loop of remembered lyrics; her lips move, but barely.

_I’ll be so alone without you. Maybe you’ll be lonesome, too. And blue._

The sea keeps pace on her right. Chips of slaty water flash by through spindly pine trees. Huge tufting clouds of fog billow around the treetops. Rain slants landward in sheets. She flicks the wipers up to their highest setting.

_Fly the ocean in a silver plane_. Her restless fingers tap the wheel. _See the jungle when it’s wet with rain._

A glance seaward shows waves sanded dull by rain, long whips of tossed foam, the water’s deep color whitened by fog. She slows her speed. 

_Just remember, till you’re home again_. She whistles the tune. _You belong to me._

A tidy wooden sign points the way to a state park. She slows a little more, takes the turn. Trees crowd the narrow road into a corridor that carries her away from one coastline toward another.

“Such a little shit,” she whispers.

On such a dismal day, in the middle of the week, there’s no one to share the road with. She drives out of woods and onto a wind-scoured point, past a handful of overlooks, around a vacant visitor center. She slows until a long empty turnout opens up ahead and steers into it, glides up close to a row of big boundary rocks. She kills the engine. Through the glass, behind intermittent bursts of wind, comes the constant booming roar of an upset ocean.

Kate turns the key enough to engage the battery. She turns the vents down. Rain ripples the windows, muscles the outside world into soft focus.

She unbuckles her seatbelt. Takes a deep breath. Lets out a long heavy sigh, covers her face to do it. She rubs at her forehead.

“I wish I had a cigarette.” She spreads her fingers, peers at her reflection. “But who am I kidding.” She leans back. “I don’t,” she sighs. “Not really.” 

She turns the radio on, guides the knob through bursts of static. A radio station comes into focus; it’s easy for her to sing along with old songs, the ones that she knows, lines written into the mind throughout childhood and polished with the soft patina of half-cognitive memories. For her, the top forties of the Reagan years have always translated into big emotions drawn in crude lines, waxy fingerprint smears, bright yet friable colors.

Kate closes her eyes. 

Though it’s still warm enough in the car to leave the engine off, the window-fog is beginning its slow creep over the glass; first it’ll cup the bottom edge of the windows, slide toward the mirrors, then it’ll bloom outward from the place where her breath touches the windshield.

Kate listens to the rain, imagines Rose sitting at their kitchen table. There’s still some daylight but it’s got that brittle, gold-flaked quality of the sun’s headlong rush toward winter. In this daydream, Rose has hung up the phone. She’s concerned. She’s gotten up, decided to move. The concern hovers in her face for the length of time it takes to make a fresh mug of tea, or to fold and put away some clean hand towels, or clear the dishes off the counter. 

But it’s ephemeral. The miles between them consume it before she takes her first sip. 

Whatever space she took up in Rose’s everyday life has healed shut. She’s become an interaction on a shelf, the memory of a life lived together; all that remains are shadows crafted out of emotion, a memory of language. Even if Kate described it to her, if she took that time, Rose would not be able to pick the view from Kate’s bedroom out of a line-up. She would not know how to navigate the endless red-carpeted hallways by sound, or be able to smell the difference between the east and west wing of the house. 

Rose would never think of a manor like this one as _the house_. 

This image of her, in the kitchen and gilded with sunlight, occupies a distant orbit.

Kate could call her again, try to explain. Make attempts. She could paint a picture, even; she could take photos, make drawings, send them.

But how to explain the way a scent of wet stone--- _this_ stone, air salted by _these_ waves, _these_ ivies, _this_ moss---shifts beneath your skin, uses its weight to shape all of your movements? How to describe how it takes on heat, steadies your knees, gives you something to carry? The stone skin of this place, sharing water and oxygen with the bodies within it. The presence in its structure, like living in Jonah’s whale, if Jonah’s whale were an ancient stone-scaled monster built out of empty rooms. Those windows like firelit eyes, ornate arms held in an endless iron hug, stone flanks bearing up red roses in the rain like they’re exit wounds.

_Hmmm...the feeling of separation usually hurts more_. 

It’s an idle thought.

Of course there’s the other side, too. The dark side. The moon flashing its dazzle, stunning your eyes with alchemical silver, so you can pretend the shadow side doesn’t exist. Light aiding and abetting, helping you commit the sin of plausible deniability. If no one ever ventures past the twilight zone, out of the sunny side and into the shunned side, can the pretense still exist?

_No_. 

Kate’s lips flatten, make a wry twist.

_There are the miles between us, and there is the Miles between us_.

Alone in her car, with the rain bashing itself against her windows, it’s easier to unclench. The smell of lavender fabric softener cooking into a meaty sweetness by sweat, a stern ocean roaring in the background; it gives her something to entrain with. Nature rhythms are the kinds of rhythms that swing down out of heaven to breathe themselves between armor and skin, to offer contemplation before whispering them apart. 

Away from the house and alone with her breath, her dozing limbs.

_How could I explain when there’s no way to peel back all those necessary layers of justification?_

Heat sweeps her skin, stiffens the forest of tiny hairs left in its wake. Her legs twitch out their stupor. Her breathing changes gears. 

_There’s no way to translate the layers, to dissolve them that way. Right now, Rose is in the opposite of a decaying orbit; she’s letting go of gravity, threatening a slow drift into space._

Kate opens her eyes, unfocuses them at the ceiling. She touches the sweat as it appears on her upper lip. 

_Everyone knows miles lead to eventual isolation._

She wets her lips with a restless tongue.

_Miles leads to eventual isolation_.

She bites her lip. 

_Miles_. 

Her breathing shallows, breaks up. The name brings with it a whole new lexicon of urges. 

“I can’t believe that little fucker kissed me,” she mutters, half-laughs.

_How does a sixteen-year-old boy teach you to be afraid of yourself_?

“When…” Her voice trails off and her eyes go out of focus. Her muscles loosen and the skin of her face ignites, radiates a swell of heat.

_Keep blushing, Katie. Just keep on doing that, you stupid slut. You hungry bitch. Get all hot and bothered over a kid. See where that gets you_.

A burn of tears threatens, but it moves on. Her chest tightens. 

_Yeah_ , her mind murmurs in Miles’s voice. _You hungry bitch_.

Her breath pulls in, locks down. She bites her lip. Trembling heat floods her body, loosens everything.

_This would never happen, Katie. He would never, he doesn’t have the spine, he’d sooner say something like that to Mrs. Grose, or to his headmaster, or his own mother_.

A hard pulse swells between her tightened thighs. She clenches her teeth.

_That is where you are, in the intersection of those three roles_.

The memory of his mouth overcomes all thought and her jaws fall open; she keeps breathing hard, air scrapes across her swelling skin. It raws the blood beneath. 

She fights to rein it all in: the galloping breath, the surging blood, her calamitous heat, the ponderous ache flaring back to life in her belly; she’s like an ember he won’t stop breathing on, won’t keep his succulent oxygen away from, his curved hands hovering between her and whatever might snuff her out. 

She thinks _you shouldn’t ask that_ and _how dare you_ and _this is so wrong_ \---but won’t bring his name into it, refuses to invoke her Pavlovian pussy’s whole want-theater thing, its dizzying pulse and drool---and _why don’t you come over here and find out_ and _how about you get on your knees bigshot_ and then there are only filmy images that surge but won’t make themselves legible and she thinks all of this in a blur, her breath choppy, one hand finding its way past her coat. Her dress. 

Her thighs part. She fingers her cotton panties.

_So wet_.

She bites her lip, slides a fingertip against her clit. Her spine jerks, her hips bucking, her thighs splaying; hot sweet electricity crackles up into her guts. Her belly tightens. Her pussy spasms.

“Fuck,” she gasps.

She slips a finger into her panties and rocks her hips, breathes out a long wavering whimper. 

“Oh God...Miles,” she half-whispers, rubs in little circles, “fuck you.”

She doesn’t last long.

“God…” Her thighs tremble. “Fuck…” Her heels dig into the floor. “M-Miles, you…” She arches her neck. “Little...fucker,” she gasps, “God…!”

She goes off like a rattling rocket.

“ _Jesus_!”

Her breath shimmies apart, her throat convulsing, her body tense and humming like a bowstring; she swoons back into the seat, her skin soaking her clothes in sweat, her cheeks tingling with heat, her eyes drifting away from focus, her tongue dried out with panting.

She dozes.

Snaps awake. Straightens up. Looks around.

Rain drums the roof of the car.

_What---_

The windows are obscured in condensation. She leans forward, wipes a circle on the windshield. She peers into whipping curtains of rain.

Kate starts the car. She turns the vents up, cracks the driver’s side window. Cold air wafts in.

“I gotta go, what…” She shakes her head, her face still flushed, the world still loosened from its moorings. “The fuck, I mean…” Her heart is feverish; her limbs feel all used up. “Goddammit.”

The condensation starts to clear.

She puts the car in gear.


	5. veritas

“Nah,” Miles says, “I’m gonna eat down here.”

Kate’s water glass halts halfway to her mouth.

“Are you sure?” Mrs. Grose turns, sets his plate on the counter. “It’s not a bother.”

Kate watches Miles stride up to the table, yank out a chair. He collapses into it. He’s wearing a black and white Icelandic sweater that’s too big, the ornate cuffs bunched up past his bony wrists, and clingy dark blue jeans; he’s restless, there’s a turbulence caught in his limbs even when they’re still. The contrasts in the wool make his pale skin look thinner, his mouth redder. His hair looks felt-up, disarrayed. He slouches, folds his hands. His feet drum the floor.

Kate takes a slow sip. Sets the water glass back down.

“I’m sure.” Miles nods, gives Mrs. Grose a brief tight-lipped smile. “I’m tired of eating in my room all the time.”

“I like it when you’re not a booger, Miles,” Flora says.

“Flora, I’ll thank you not to discuss bodily secretions at the dinner table.” Mrs. Grose’s voice is gruff, but she’s smiling. She picks up Miles’s plate, carries it over, slides it in front of him. “Please.”

“All right,” Flora sighs. “Fine.”

“Kate,” says Mrs. Grose, placing her own plate on the table. “Would you care for a glass of wine?”

"I promise I won't be a…" Miles glances over his shoulder at Mrs. Grose, lowers his voice. He leans toward Flora, shields his mouth with one hand. "B-O-O-G-E-R."

Flora giggles.

“Um…” Kate’s eyes follow Miles as he leans back in his seat. She sighs through her nose, shakes her head. “Sure.” She looks at Mrs. Grose, relaxes into a smile. “That’d be great.”

“It’s a Merlot.” Mrs. Grose walks back to the counter, heels clicking on the floor. “Is that all right?”

“Yeah, it’s perfect.”

Flora shakes out her napkin, spreads it over her lap. She glances at Kate, makes a disdainful face. “Miles says that wine is just pretentious grape juice.”

“Um.” Kate snorts, bursts out laughing; she covers her mouth and coughs. Her face warms. “Well.”

Mrs. Grose opens a cupboard, takes down a second goblet. 

“I could say a couple things to that,” Kate says, chuckling, “but instead I’ll just correct him,” she lifts her brows, darts a glance at Miles, “and tell you that yes, wine does start out as grape juice, but the thing that makes grape juice turn into wine is letting it get older and wiser.”

Mrs. Grose uncorks the bottle.

“I mean...surely you studied Latin in school, Miles.” Kate takes a quick sip from her water glass, wipes her mouth with her fingers. “In vino veritas?”

“Sure.” He holds her gaze, sounds disinterested. “In wine, there is truth.”

Mrs. Grose circles the table, holds a goblet over Kate’s shoulder.

“Very good.” Kate nods, reaches up, takes it. “Thank you.”

“You’re quite welcome, Kate. If you’d like more, all you need do is ask.”

“I will, thank you.” Kate keeps her eyes on Miles’s face. “Not a lot of truth hiding in grape juice, is there?” 

He shrugs, watches her lift the goblet to her lips. His cheeks bloom pink. “I dunno.”

“Come on, Miles.” Flora rolls her eyes. “That _is_ what you said.” She picks up her fork. “You don’t get to change it now just because you feel stupid.”

“Flora,” says Mrs. Grose, taking a seat. “That’s enough.” Her tone is mild. “Apologize, please.”

Miles narrows his eyes at Flora. “I don’t feel stupid.”

“Fine.” Flora heaves a huge, dramatic sigh. “I’m sorry, Miles.”

He pulls the plate closer, picks up his fork. “I will have you know,” he mutters. "That I do _not_ feel stupid.”

“Kate.” Mrs. Grose shakes out her napkin, sharpens her voice. She glances back and forth between the children. “Did you enjoy your trip into town?”

“Oh, uh…” Kate nods, takes another drink of wine. She sets the glass down. “Yeah.” Alcohol doubles the flush in her cheeks. “I did, thank you.”

Flora tilts her head. “Did you buy anything?”

“No, I’m afraid.” Kate flashes her a bright smile and picks up her fork, pokes at her plate. She looks at Mrs. Grose. “Is this beef bourguignon?”

“Then...why’d you go into town?” Flora wrinkles her nose. “I mean...what’s the point?”

“Yes!” Mrs. Grose beams. “It is, this is my mother’s recipe as a matter of fact.”

Miles glances at Flora, snorts dry laughter. He looks down his nose at her. “Maybe she just wanted to get away from you.”

“It smells...I-I mean, I meant to say this to you earlier, when…” Kate closes her eyes, takes a breath, shakes her head. She turns her attention to Flora. “Of course I didn’t leave just to get away from you, Flora, but…”

“Well, Miles,” Flora sing-song taunts, wagging her head back and forth, “maybe she just wanted to get away from _you_ then.”

“Children.” Mrs. Grose picks up her fork, keeps her voice calm. “That is enough.”

Miles pushes himself back in the chair, rolls his eyes. He curls his top lip, makes a simpering face. He gives Flora the finger.

“Miles!” Mrs. Grose glares at him. “I said…” Her voice booms. “That is _enough_!”

Kate’s heart skips a beat. She blinks several more times, curls her hands against her waist. She glances at the kids’ faces.

Flora’s eyes get big. She lifts her eyebrows, bites both lips, pantomimes a scandalized face. She takes a deep breath, returns her attention to her plate.

“Honestly.” Mrs. Grose clears her throat. “You have got to take charge here, Kate.” Her tone flattens out. “You must not allow these children to walk all over you.”

Miles turns toward Kate, drapes an elbow on the table; his mouth quirks into a tiny, fleeting smile. He tilts his head, keeps his eyes on hers.

“Otherwise,” continues Mrs. Grose, “they’ll never listen.”

“Miles,” Kate says, firming up her voice. She looks at her plate, picks up her napkin. “I want you to apologize to your sister.”

“Or what?” He smirks, looks her over. “What’re you gonna do?” He lifts his chin, leans forward. He looks straight into her eyes. His voice drips boredom. “Send me to my room?”

“I mean---I probably should.” Kate shakes out her napkin. “But that’s exactly what you want, so...” She glances at him and her smile turns sweet. “No.”

Mrs. Grose lifts a forkful of potato to her mouth, glances back and forth between them.

“Fine,” Miles mutters, pursing his lips and blowing hair up off his forehead. He slumps back into the chair. He glances at Flora. “Sorry, kid.”

“It was rather rude of you,” says Flora.

“Yeah, yeah.” Miles straightens up, curls an arm around his plate. “I know.” He pulls it closer, stabs a chunk of softened carrot. “Rub it in, why don’t you?”

Flora straightens her neck, puts on a lofty tone. “I accept your apology, Miles.”

He gives her a fake, strained smile. “Thank you.” 

“Anyway.” Kate clears her throat. “Um.” She claps her hands. “As I was saying before, I meant to tell you this when I got home, this smells...absolutely divine, I haven’t eaten beef bourguignon in...God, I don’t know, a hundred years?” She shakes back her hair, utters a trembling laugh. “I mean…” She rolls her eyes. “It feels that way, anyway.”

“Well...have a taste, then.” Mrs. Grose gestures to Kate’s plate, gives her a warm smile. “Go on, do let us know what you think.”

Kate gathers up a bit of mushroom and carrot, a tiny tender chunk of meat; Miles watches it move close to her lips, his feverish mouth softening just enough to open.   
Kate glances at him sidelong. Her face gets hot. Miles’s breath gets louder and deeper and she fidgets in her chair.

She closes her eyes, opens wide enough to run her tongue along the underside of the tines.

Miles huffs out a sharp breath. 

“Mmmmm.” Kate envelops the fork up to its neck, slides the tines out.” “That is...so good, I mean it’s delicious.” She giggles. “Really, Mrs. Grose,” she goes on, still grinning and scraping up another bite, “thank you so much for making it, I mean...it’s the perfect day for it, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I thought so myself.” Mrs. Grose sounds pleased. “It’s always nice and warm on such a cold day.”

“Yeah.” Kate nods, her mouth full. “Exactly.”

“It is a joy to make.”

“I did enjoy my trip into town, even though the weather was lousy.” Kate shrugs. “I ended up going for a little drive.” She takes a drink of water. “Looking at the scenery.”

“It is beautiful, even in the rain.” Mrs. Grose glances out the darkened window. “Some think it beautiful _because_ of the rain, if you can imagine that.”

“I can.” Kate nods, picks at her food. “It takes a special soul to love Maine weather, I think.”

“Yes, indeed.” Mrs. Grose tops off her own glass of wine. “I can agree to that.”

“Your face is all red.” Flora’s voice is matter-of-fact.

“Yeah...well.” Kate laughs, shakes her head. “Wine does that sometimes.”

“It does.” Mrs. Grose’s mouth twitches into a brief smile. “Perhaps one glass will be enough, then?”

“Perhaps so,” Kate says, nodding. She snatches up her goblet, takes a long drink; she starts to giggle and grins instead. “Perhaps indeed.”

Flora looks at Mrs. Grose. “What’s for dessert?”

“I made us a pomegranate-lemon tart, dear.” Mrs. Grose touches a napkin to the corners of her mouth. “We had all those pomegranates left over in the box from the co-op and it seemed a horrible waste to just...let them go.”

Flora looks skeptical. “Is there ice cream, too?”

“Of course, darling.” Mrs. Grose chuckles. “There’s always plenty of French vanilla in the freezer.”

“Well...not _always_ ,” says Flora, poking potatoes with her fork.

“My God, it was one time.” Miles grins. “One time, Flora.” He holds up a finger. “But you’re never gonna let me forget it, are you?”

“You ate _all_ the ice cream, Miles.” Flora arches an eyebrow. “I mean... _all_ of it.”

Blunt nails skim the outside of Kate’s bare thigh and she twitches, huffs out a sharp breath, jerks her knee inward.

“It was a half carton!”

Kate shifts in her seat. Her skirt twitches up and she feels the underside of the table, searches for a snag. A strong hand wraps around her thigh. She touches a wrist, palms the thick bunched-up cuff of a wool sweater. She blinks. 

“But you didn’t save any for me and that’s rude!”

“I was hungry.” Miles laughs. “I couldn’t help it, all right?”

Kate’s spine stiffens. Those long lean fingers spread a little, dig into the softest part; dull heat drops down into her pelvis, strums the muscles of her inner thighs. The thumb, thickened across the pad, skims back and forth across her kneecap. Heavy goosebumps scatter up her spine, make her shiver. Her breath stops.

“Nooo, it’s not all right.” Flora gives Miles an exaggerated frown. “It’s mean.”

“Well I assure you there’s plenty now,” says Mrs. Grose, forking up another bite. “More than enough to withstand the assaults of desserts _and_ midnight snacks.”

Miles adjusts his chair. 

“Pomegranate lemon, uh…” Kate sits straight up, brushes her bangs out of her eyes. “Wow!” Her smile is startled, tremulous. Her voice is breathy. “That sounds...absolutely delicious.”

His hand drifts toward her hip and she shifts in the seat, traps his fingers with her thighs.

“Not much else in season in November, I’m afraid,” says Mrs. Grose. “And it is always my preference to use fresh produce, as you might imagine.”

“Oh!” Kate nods. “Uh...oh yeah, I would, I would, I mean…” She waves a flappy hand. “Your food is always so good.” She laughs. “So of course you do.”

“Thank you, Kate.” Mrs. Grose smiles at her. “That’s very nice to hear.”

“She makes violet syrup in the spring.” Miles’s hand squirms a little higher. “There’s probably still a little left, if you’d like to try some.”

Kate’s eyes get bigger. She slides her knees together, crosses her ankles. 

“There are tons of sweet violets on the property.” Miles looks in her eyes, slides the edge of his pinky along the seam of her pussy. “They grow like weeds.” 

Kate’s throat spasms around her roughening breath. Her nostrils flare. Her mouth flattens into a trembling line.

“The syrup is especially good in stuff like…” Miles’s mouth drowses into the barest hint of a smile. “Lemonade.” One fingertip traces a feathery circle over the shape of her clit. His voice gets husky. “And iced tea.”

Kate’s inner thighs spasm, squeeze tighter; a bright throb of heat loosens her voice and she claps a hand over her mouth. She starts to shudder and squeezes her eyes shut, grabs the edge of the table, fakes a sudden volley of loud wrenching sneezes.

Miles’s eyebrows shoot up. A big, open, gleaming smile spreads across his face.

“Well gesundheit!” Flora shouts.

“Bless you, goodness!” Mrs. Grose puts her napkin on the table. “Are you quite sure you’re feeling well?” 

Kate wipes at her nose with a shaking hand, shrinks into the chair like a furtive animal. She glances around the table. Her cheeks are bright red.

“As Flora noted earlier, your face is quite red.” Mrs. Grose pushes her chair back. “Might you be running a fever?”

“I-I…” Kate sniffles, rubs her nostrils. She glances at Miles. “I might be coming down with something, it’s possible.”

Miles tugs his hand loose. Kate pushes her skirt down, crosses her legs.

“I’m not…I-I’m not used to the cold here, so it’s possible I guess.” Kate rolls her eyes. “And then I went and spent the afternoon out in this rain.” She utters a wild, unraveling laugh. “Stupid me, right?”

“I’ll go fetch a thermometer,” says Mrs. Grose.

“No!” Kate picks up the goblet, swallows what’s left. “No, that’s...that’s not necessary, really, I’ll just…” She pushes her chair away from the table. “I-I can go to bed.”

“Yeah, maybe you should.” Miles rubs his mouth, watches her face. “You look…” He rubs his mouth. “I mean…” He looks in her eyes, sucks something off the tip of his middle finger. “You seem tired?”

“If you like, if you like.” Mrs. Grose nods, rubs her hands on her apron. “I could make you a tray.”

“Thank you.” Kate stands up too fast, knocks the edge of the table with her thighs. “That’s fine.” She takes a step back, stumbles a little. “That’ll be fine, thank you.” A weak grin flickers across her face. “I appreciate it.”

“Go on, then.” Mrs. Grose shoos her toward the doorway. “Off with you. Run yourself a nice hot bath, and I’ll take care of this in a bit.” She starts toward Kate’s abandoned plate. “I’ll send one of the children up with a tray, if you like.”

“That would be wonderful.” Kate nods, smoothes the front of her skirt down. “Thank you so much, I appreciate it.”

“Good night, Kate.” Miles’s smile is soft and lop-sided. “I hope you feel better.”

Kate doesn’t say anything.

She doesn’t look at him.

She hurries out.


	6. along the nile

_ Knock _ .

_ Knock _ .

“Hey.” 

Miles’s voice is quiet. 

“I’ve got your tray.”

Kate glances at the door. She’s sitting on the edge of her bed, hair still damp at the ends, one hand wrapped tight around the lapels of her bathrobe. “Leave it.”

“You’re gonna be like that?” He sighs. 

“Like what?” Kate gets up and strides up the door, a crackling edge to her voice. “Like what, exactly, Miles?”

“Like you thought it was gonna be Flora out here and not me.”

Kate pulls in a deep breath. Her eyes burn; her voice jigs and jags. “You can leave it.”

“But…” He brings his mouth close to the door. “I wanna come in.”

Kate makes fists, grits her teeth. She hangs her head. Closes her eyes. “I know.”

“I’ll behave, if that’s what you want.” His words put on a well-worn cadence, broken-in and silky. “I can be a nice boy.”

“Yeah.” She rubs her eyes, steadies her breath. Folds her arms. Looks at the ceiling. “But nice boys keep their hands to themselves.”

He sighs. “Let me in, Kate.”

“No.” Kate shakes her head. “All I have on is a bathrobe.”

“Now,” he sighs. “Why would you tell me that? Because you didn’t have to.” His lips hover close to the crack between the door and the jamb. “But now that you have, I’m imagining you naked.”

Her scalp prickles, burns. “You are---outrageous,” she snarls.

“I’m hard,” he half-whispers.

Kate’s cheeks heat up and she slams a hand into the door; it rattles in its frame. “Goddammit, Miles!”

“Let me in.” His voice drops. “I’ll do whatever you want.” He breathes faster. “I’ll eat your pussy...I’ll fuck you.” His voice cracks. “Anything.”

Kate grabs her own face; a wave of heat gushes out of her blood and floods underneath her skin, shimmers inside her chest. Her ribs tighten around her heart until the wild booming thud of it drowns her ears. “Just...leave...the...tray,” she half-whispers.

“Let me in,” he half-whispers back, his voice skinned and plaintive. “Please.”

“I-I...” Her lungs weaken. “Can’t, it…” She swallows, wrestles the trembling of her voice. “It would be...this is wrong.”

“Are you shaking?”

Kate leans her forehead into the door. The wood holds the cool of the house, a blessing bestowed by constant stone. She catches her breath. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You were shaking downstairs, too.”

Kate reaches for the doorknob, caresses it. “Still…” Her eyes are closed. She breathes through her mouth. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Are you still wet?”

“You shouldn’t…” She pulls back, looks at the door. “What the…” She shakes her head, searches for words. “I-I can’t…” She huffs. “ _ Why _ do you talk to me like this?”

“Because you sure were at the dinner table.”

“This is so---humiliating,” she snarls. “Don’t you have any respect for me?” 

“Apologies.” He puts on a prissy sing-song schoolboy’s tone. “Is your pussy still wet, Miss Kate?”

Tears sting her eyes. Her guts fold in, drop into her pelvis. Her mouth flattens into a tight trembling line. She lunges at the lock, fumbles the twist. She pulls back the door. 

Miles is there, his bare forearms hanging at his sides, the tips of his bare toes against the threshold. He blinks up at her, his big black eyes darkened by indirect light, his puffy mouth slanted and loose. He doesn’t move.

Kate grips the edge of the door, her palm propped against the jamb. She stares at him, her face flushed. Her chest heaves.

His eyebrows lift. “Is that a yes?” 

Kate pulls in a sharp breath, narrows her eyes. She slaps him across the face. 

“Ouch!” He fingers the vicious red bloom in his skin. “Jesus!”

“All right.” Her voice brittles along its edges. She folds her arms, glares at him. “You want to try again?”

“You’re a slap-happy bitch, God.” Miles palms his cheek, rubs it.

“Apologize.” 

He takes tiny shuffling steps, edges sideways, attempts a slink toward the interior but her arm shoots out, catches him by the collarbones. Her hand grips his bony shoulder.

“And if I don’t?” Miles’s tone is jaunty and hard; he flips his hair and gives her a fleeting little half-smile but his voice wavers. “What are you gonna do?” He curls a hot sweaty hand around her wrist. “Spank me?”

“It’s too late for that.” 

Kate pulls on her wrist and his fingers spasm. Her voice bottoms out. “It’s obvious no one’s ever spanked you a day in your spoiled, pampered little life.”

He glances down his nose, curls his lip, sneers. “Fuck you.”

She slams the door.

Miles blinks, his spine twinging toward perfect posture.

Kate grabs him by the shoulders and slams him up against the door; his lips break their seal, a chestful of air huffing out between them. His face startles into a hungry focus. She moves closer and he shrinks up against the wood, his spine slackening. His thighs fidget. His gaze bounces between her eyes and her lips. 

She breathes through her nose, looks in his eyes, takes a step closer. Her mouth is firm. His mouth opens and his eyes soften. His breath speeds up. She runs the base of her thumb along the edge of his jaw and he closes his eyes, the lids trembling. Her fingertips brush his throat. His neck jerks. 

Kate licks her lips, watches his mouth. She traces the slope of one feverish cheekbone. 

Miles’s erratic puffs of breath dissolve into chest-heaving.

“You think you’re grown,” she leans in, whispers it to his hairline. “But you’re not.”

With a slow hand he takes her wrist, pulls her hand off his face, tugs it down. He brings it to the bulging ridge of his hard cock, brushes it with her fingers; he cups them around it, squeezes her hand tight. He buries his face in the long curve of her neck, nudges his hips. His breathing shallows.

“Oh Jesus,” Kate whispers, her thighs gone to water, her balance drowning in an undertow; she holds the back of his head, rubs her burning face in his pile of hair.

Miles whimpers, uses her hand to stroke. He smothers himself with her heated skin, the restraint in her muscles, the wild thrum of her pulse. With his other hand, he unbuttons his jeans. “Please,” he whispers.

There’s a damp patch over the head. Kate scratches it and Miles writhes, chokes on a thin petulant moan. He unzips his jeans. She glides a hand across the churn of his belly, thumbs a sparse trail of silky black hairs; his lungs jitter and spur toward gasping, his hollowed belly pulling harder for air. Goosebumps erupt, disrupt the smooth flow of his skin. She ruffles his stiffened hairs. 

He grabs the back of her neck, pushes her fingers down. 

Kate works his cock free of his clothes, wraps her fingers around the shaft; it’s not long but it’s got an unexpected heft, thick with a mellow curve. The soft skin swells up tight, pulses thick and hard into her palm. She strokes up around the head and his back arches; a hot whining breath shivers out of him.

“Mmmm,” she whispers, kisses his cheek. “I guess this isn’t a boy’s cock, is it?”

Miles pushes the bridge of his nose into hers. “Kiss me,” he breathes.

Kate lets go, lifts the bathrobe off the floor, lowers her bare knees to its chilly wood; through her wall of racing blood, she smells ancient oil worked into the boards, fabric-dust, a lingering weakness of sun.

Rain taps and rattles the window glass.

Miles leans into the door, hands loosening, his whole body moving up and down with his breath.

His hips fit her hands like halves of a broken thing she’s pressing together for dear life and there’s too much grit in the spaces where they kiss; those cresting hip bones harbor her hooked thumbs---she rests her face, his opened jeans a harbor of another kind, chin anchored to a vigorous arch of pubic bone, and breathes in a ghost of lavender fabric softener. She thinks somewhere lost and still adrift, displaced beneath her own skin,  _ does a mouth have the power to make something whole again _ and she reaches for his cock like a rung, straightens her body, opens her mouth.

\--- _ want to know I want to I want to find out _ \---

But he snatches his harbors away.

He gets on his knees, too.

Kate’s eyes pop open; everything's out of focus, a collection of too-bright and fuzzed shadow. Unmoored, dizzy, she shakes the rosy stupor out of her face.

“No.”

His fingers, warm as firelight, find her face and gather her up. So gentle. 

“Not that.”

Her dazed mouth opens. She brings her eyes back to his, searches them like a new country waiting for a map.

“This.” Miles leans in, kisses one corner of her mouth; his restraint breaks up, a gush of velvet-wet breath drowning her chin. “This.” 

She can’t look. Her eyes squeeze shut, the lashes trembling; she can’t look, it hurts in the spaces between her ribs.

“This.” Miles kisses the other, does it with a trembling, soft, open-mouthed hunger. He makes his voice deep, rough. “Kiss me, Kate.”

She flinches, gasps at the sound of her name.

“Can’t you?” His hands fall from her face. “Don’t you…I mean.” He swallows and his voice thins out, rustles in his chest. “Don’t you...don’t you want to?”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. Her eyes well up. She opens them and they spill over, a freight of water gleaming. She wipes it up. “This is…” She glances at the ceiling, rubs her mouth. Her voice drops to a papery whisper. “A bad idea.”

“That’s...that’s n-not what...” He sits on his heels, runs a hand over his mouth. He sighs, quick and hard. “That’s not what I asked you.”

“I don’t think---”

“Why can’t you kiss me?” He shakes his head and his eyes get bigger, stun the rest of his face into a tender stillness. “Is it so hard to answer that one simple question?”

“Because---” Kate shakes her head and looks down, her forehead tensing, her throat working. “Because I…” She closes her eyes, bares her teeth. Her voice runs out of steam and her shoulders deflate. Her neck droops. Her head hangs. “It’s because---” Her hands curl into tight fists that she bounces close to her knees, bounces until her forearms vibrate. She raises her voice. She won’t look at him. “It’s because I don’t want to  _ feel  _ anything!”

“What?” His spine snaps straight. His voice cracks.“You mean you don’t feel anything  _ now _ ?”

Kate’s body slumps over; she buries her face with her hands, her legs curling to one side, her body shaking all over. She sniffles, strains her voice. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

Miles scrambles onto his feet. “How  _ did  _ you mean it, then?”

“I don’t know.” Kate muffles her mouth with her palms. Her eyes squeeze shut and she bursts into abrupt, ugly sobbing. Her voice thins into a choppy whisper. “I’m so sorry.”

Miles backs up. One hand feels for the doorknob.

“Why don’t you just…” Kate flings a weak arm in his direction. “Go away, Miles?” She shakes her head, her breath hiccuping. “Why don’t you just...fuck off.” The words come out slurred, thick and bubbling with snot. She snorts, a dramatic and languid gesture. “Fuck off, Miles.”

His voice thrums with nerves. “What is  _ wrong  _ with you?”

“Go away, and…” Kate looks up with drowned eyes, her pinched pink face a floodplain. She flips a lazy hand at the door. “Just leave me alone,” she mutters.

Miles grips the doorknob. “What if I don’t want to?”

Kate pulls herself up, staggers to her feet. She holds the lapels of her robe closed. “You want to.” Her voice is heavy and slow. “Oh, you want to.”

He raises his voice, sharpens it. “Yeah, but what if I don’t?”

“Save it,” she murmurs, “your bravado is useless.” She snorts. “And fake.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you’re just a boy.” Kate makes her way to the bed, steadies herself. She grabs one of the wooden posters. “And that this is ridiculous.”

“Those are some pretty big words for someone who’s scared of feeling something.”

She flicks a glance over her shoulder. “Go away, Miles.”

“Look…” He blows out a long breath, holds a small silence. “I don’t know what to say to you, okay?”

“I do, I want nothing from you.” Kate circumnavigates the bed, climbs into it from the far side. “Just...silence, Miles.” She piles her lap with rumpled blankets. “You don’t have to say anything to me.”

“But---”

“Hush. Shhhh.” She slides her bangs back with both hands, rubs her forehead. “Go find something else.”

Miles takes a hesitant step. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m sure you can go find another conquest somewhere, another horse to break.” She folds her arms, holds them tight against her waist. “That’s your thing, isn’t it?”

Miles’s voice fills with tears. “You’re mean.”

“Yeah?” Kate shrugs, sighs through her nose. “Well…” She looks out the window. “So are you.”

He sniffles, wipes his cheeks.

“Please...go.”

Miles turns the doorknob, pulls the door inward, makes a small space to squirm through. 

The floorboards grunt at his steps, exhausted.

The door clicks shut on his sudden absence.

The room gasps around her; Kate looks out the window and puts a hand over her frenzied heart, waits for the knots in her chest to loosen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> along the nile = a long denial
> 
> let me have my sad wordplay in peace ok


	7. silence

At night, sometimes, when it’s too quiet, Kate snaps out of sleep---her eyes slitting open, all the thin shades of bedroom light reintroducing themselves, her breath slowed, her body still dull and stupid---and she’ll find herself attuned to the depths of silence, her skin gone still as the air, until the spell breaks.

She breathes in and the room’s emptiness cups the sound, brings it close to her ears. When she exhales, the cavernous lung-rush inside and the sibilant sigh beyond her lips meet over---nothing.

Kate turns onto her back, closes her eyes. She moves past the noise of her body, past the dead air of the room, past the heavy curtains shifting in a slight draft, past the creak of the heater, past the murmuring echo of rain still tapping the panes of glass.

The whole house, a held breath.

Her muscles vibrate.

She waits.

She rustles in her bed, twitches toward a sound of footfalls that never comes.

No bench-scrape.

No hollow _thunk_ as the keys are laid bare and made ready for the caressing.

No breath joining her own.

Her eyes get tired. Every time she closes them, a dreamed light-click or creaking stair forces them open, throws a deep hitch in her breath.

 _He’s not going to play_ , a voice in her mind says, _go back to sleep_.

But another voice, hiding within and lurking beneath, a voice that isn’t a voice at all but instead a pointed presence that forms itself out of urges and half-assembled images and hollows where scent would live if the brain could reassemble smells and the taste of bitter salt on her tongue, won’t relinquish the vigil.

The part of her mind closest to the surface applies a careful coat of gleaming logic to the situation: _you could get up and get dressed and go look_.

Her gut speaks, its language of subtly bubbling pain and humming anticipation surging out an answer: _don’t start none, won’t be none_.

“I should sleep,” she whispers, a sound like rustling paper. “I almost want to, but...I can’t.”

Twilight minutes come and go, stay the same, push the numbers on the clock forward. She does get up, her cocoon of warmth sliding off with the blankets; she doesn’t dress, wades through the milky gray dark. Her hands float out, touch the small boombox she brought with her; she fingers the buttons, traces their shapes.

Pushes PLAY.

The night lights up with polished brass, ushers in a chorus of oooh-ing woman-voices made both sugared and eerie by an enormity of stone-wrapped silence; one woman’s voice steps forward, unloads the undulant whiskey velvet of another age:

_See the pyramids along the Nile_  
_Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle_

Kate climbs back to her bed. She slides back into the cocoon, piles blankets atop her simmering shivers.

Turns her back on the music.

Faces the span of air her bedroom door would push aside.

Closes her eyes.

She falls asleep to the thought of that wind, of what it would do to her hair.


	8. watcher

The next day comes brimming with rain, grayed light, naked trees, a shadowing presence of wet stone and fallen leaves and rising fog---steam wells up out of the ground when the rain is too cold, when it’s almost snow, when each drop comes out of the north holding onto its tiny core of salt-rotted ice but fog will also roll in when rain hitches its ride on a gale from the tropics, bringing tattered but warm waters left by a dead hurricane that slap ground and icy ocean currents alike out of their innate frigidity and into a thick veiled sigh.

The day after is the same, and then the next, the next, and so on, until there’s a long row of darkening days discerned by how deep the mud on the property is, whether the fog rises in the morning or rolls in at night, whether that day’s precipitation taps you on the face or drizzles onto exposed skin in a bone-numbing mist or chases you back into the warm firelit shelter of indoors, its whirling water-whips packed full of stinging cold; it’s easy for her to build order out of such soft days, to fashion a cozy rhythm out of indoor life.

The mornings are given over to a later rise than any she ever had under New York’s public school system, a leisurely shower, a hearty breakfast put on by Mrs. Grose---scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and pancakes, but also popovers, omelettes, handmade croissants, eggs Benedict---and the structure and delivery of Flora’s schooling. Teaching Flora is a genuine joy; she takes to learning with a velocity, a casual diligence. Her burning mind gulps down knowledge for oxygen and trades that constant curious hunger for a hot and beaming light. She’s like quicksilver, shimmering and dynamic and ready to adapt herself to whatever tasks come her way.

The lowering winterlight has a calming effect on Flora. Though she was never, in Kate’s experience, a fractious child, the hastened arrival of rich autumn dark lends Flora a certain ease in surrendering to order, a supple and resilient attitude, and a desire for the kind of cozy stillness that’s perfect for digging deep into academic work. As a teacher, Kate often sees the opposite in children of Flora’s age---a restlessness at the dark, frustration at being kept inside by inclement weather, a sullenness brought on by fantasies of playing outside.

 _It’s okay because I like the dark_ , Flora says, in the early evening, a salmon-tinted sunset deepening and filling with windows with a bruised blue. _In the dark no one’s watching...I mean because you can’t see, duh_. She sits wrapped in the orange light of a well-stoked fire, paging through her history text. _And that makes it easier to relax, because no one can see you. And when you’re relaxed, you can sleep better_.

Kate blinks, the room flame-hot and stone-cold and keeping her still as a held breath.

 _You wanna ask, don’t you_. Flora sighs, marks her place in the book. She looks up. The firelight makes her pupils huge, her eyes black. _About being watched in the daytime_.

Kate snaps her mouth shut, thinks about smiling. She nods instead.

 _Yeah_. Flora sighs again, turns her face to the flames. _The social workers did, too_.

It’s then that Kate dares to move, feels the cold walls loosen just enough. She takes a careful seat behind Flora, remembers from the early days of her training that the troubled kids in a classroom---usually poor and disheveled, often tired and ill-behaved in prescribable, predictable ways---sometimes won’t tell it straight to your face, that in order to coax them into comfort you have to sit to the side, or to sit behind them, that having to tell it to a human face triggers a shame-wall too thick to speak through.

Kate folds her hands on her lap, looks into the flames too. She asks about the social workers and in a low voice, with ponderous diction, Flora describes how they came to the house after her parents died, then came again the first time Miles was expelled from school; it was a day school back then, Mr. Grose drove him to and from a small private school deep in the Maine countryside every day so Miles could keep the privilege of riding his own horses and eating his dinners at home and playing his own instruments and sleeping in his own bed. _They asked all sorts of questions_ , says Flora, _and some of them were quite silly, really_.

Kate probes for details. Flora laughs a light, flitting, adult laugh and claims that she does not recall all the details, only the feeling of them, and that she remembers now how she had thought them silly. There were questions about who wore clothes at home, and where does everyone sleep, and what is everyone’s job, and really all that was too much for a child of that age to keep straight in her head. _Has anyone ever asked you silly questions?_ Flora turns her head, watches Kate out of the corners of her eyes. Her voice quiets with seriousness. _Did the social workers come to your house when you were little?_

Kate closes her eyes to answer. _Yes_ , she says, _they did, my mother wasn’t well. In the head, I mean. She wasn’t well enough in her head to be a good mother and take care of me properly, so when I went to school it was in clothes that weren’t clean or didn’t fit, I still remember not being able to eat because she went for days without preparing food. I didn’t have a father growing up. I wasn’t lucky, like you; I didn’t have any siblings to watch out for me either. It was just her and me_.

Flora wants to know if Kate’s mother is still alive, and if she hates her for not being good at the job of mothering.

 _She is, but she lives in a hospital now_. Kate’s skin crawls, a chill edging into her fingers and toes; her armpits feel slimy, her layers of clothes heavy enough to push the blood out of her skin. _I hated her when I was young, but now I don’t, because I know she couldn’t help it, I understand that better. It’s easier for me. She didn’t want to be ill. I forgave her_.

Flora nods, plays with the skirt of her dress, watches her restless fingers and states that she is sometimes angry with her mother and father for dying. Her voice is thin, halting.

 _I understand_. Kate opens her eyes and thinks about touching Flora, about placing a steadying hand on her tiny shoulder, but her indecision over the idea weakens her and Flora’s overwrought composure intimidates her into stillness. _That you might feel that way makes sense to me_.

Flora nods, keeps the front of her body oriented toward the fire. _The daytime watcher was Mr. Quint, but it’s okay because he’s dead now. Mrs. Grose said he had a horseback riding accident and his neck got broke. But even though he’s not here anymore, thinking about daytime watchers is my habit now, and it’s become very hard for me to break it_.

Kate nods, the cold creeping further in. It ascends her arms, swarms her scalp, plucks all of her hairs into sharp goosebumps. She folds her arms around her waist, holds them tight to herself, shivers. She clenches her jaws to keep the clicking out of her teeth and looks at the back of Flora’s head and asks about Miles, if Quint watched Miles too, if Miles had a habit too.

 _Nope_. Flora vigorously shakes her head. _Miles loved Mr. Quint_. She rolls her eyes. _Because they’re both boys, of course Miles was his favorite_.

Mrs. Grose walks in then with her affected detachment, with the careful roaming placement of her attention, and in a mild voice she admonishes Flora not to tell tales. That rouses Flora out of her afternoon fire-lulled complacency; she whips her head around and narrows her dark eyes and informs Mrs. Grose that a tale is a lie and that she does not lie, and even if she wanted to tell lies, why would she tell them to Miss Kate? Why should she tell lies about Mr. Quint, or the social workers, or about Miles? _Miss Kate lives here too_ , Flora says, her voice puffed up with indignation, _and she has a right to know the truth_.

Mrs. Grose utters one of her dry discrete little laughs, shakes a head heavy with stylized mirth, and suggests that little girls only ever know one side of any truth and that any adult will always know better---that in the case of any truth, there is more than one side.

Flora’s face, stricken with a hard but unsure emotion, crumples for a brief second before smoothing out and taking on the same stony cold composure as her brother’s; she tilts her face just enough to shadow contempt and flicks a bit of gaze down the length of her nose before returning her attention to her history book. She resettles herself in her chair. _If you say so_ , she says, in a put-upon childish octave. _Of course_.

 _I’ll remind you that no one likes a sass_ , says Mrs. Grose, advancing with a kettle of tea. She refills Kate’s mug. _Especially when the sass in question is a young lady_.

Flora wrinkles her nose. She doesn’t look up. _I guess I don’t care for ladyhood much_.

Kate bites her lip, eases air out through her nose to avoid laughing. Flora hears the disruption in Kate’s breath and turns, her curved mouth demure but her squinty-cornered eyes glittering with mischief. Kate cuts her gaze away and shifts in her seat, forces her mouth into an equally demure shape. She glances up, thanks Mrs. Grose for the tea.

 _Do not allow these children to fill your head with nonsense, Kate_. Mrs. Grose straightens up, turns her body toward the window. She looks through the glass. _They’re both apt to fill your head fore to aft with all sorts of nonsense, should you allow them_.

Kate sips the tea, winces at its boiling heat. She puts the cup down, clears her throat, smoothes her skirt, and assures Mrs. Grose that there’s room in her philosophy for all sorts of fancies, both fact and fiction, and that while that is true, she is capable of discerning each from the other for herself.

Mrs. Grose turns away from the window.

 _Flights of fancy are necessary to a child’s growth and development_. Kate forces herself into a private schoolgirl’s posture, holds the old woman’s narrowed, beady gaze. _The mind is like a muscle and a constant exercise of narrative, be it of the creative or factual kind, will only make it stronger_.

Mrs. Grose voices a throaty and contemptuous sound, purses her lips, squares her shoulders, and carries the kettle back to the kitchen.

Flora watches her go, then puts her book down. She turns, waves Kate closer. Kate gets up, walks over, bends down. Flora cups a hand around Kate’s ear and whispers that Mrs. Grose doesn’t like it when she talks about Mr. Quint. _Mrs. Grose didn’t like him at all_ , Flora says, _when she thinks we aren’t around she says he was an animal that deserved to die, but I don’t like that, because animals aren’t to blame for what they do, they’re just animals doing what animals do_.

Kate keeps her eyes on the doorway. She gestures that Flora should offer her ear. Flora nods and stretches her neck and tilts an ear toward the ceiling; Kate cups a clammy hand around Flora’s ear, whispers that she wants to know who told Flora those things, because she agrees, she likes the way they feel, that whoever told her those things was right. Instead of stating outright that Mrs. Grose is wrong, Kate clears her throat. She glances at the doorway. She returns her attention to Flora, smiles.

 _Miles told me_ , Flora says, grinning up at her, _it was Miles who said it_.

Kate’s smile strains, flickers a little, and she thinks---of course it was, of course he did.

 _Also...I think I’d rather read now_ , if you don’t mind, says Flora, her voice wan and slow. _If that’s all right with you_.

Kate nods; she assures Flora that she doesn’t mind, listens to the sounds of Mrs. Grose in the kitchen beginning her preparations for the evening meal.


	9. notes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning this chapter for references to child sexual abuse

Miles, who takes all of his meals in his room.

Miles, who won’t get out of bed before noon.

Kate leans her elbows on the desk, drops her face into her cupped hands.

She sighs.

In the afternoons, she leaves Flora in the schoolroom with independent study assignments---reading, drawing, writing---and does her best to build upon the educational foundations laid by Miles’s last school. The headmaster sent a pile of books, a list of additional resources, his school records, and a transcript; Kate’s efforts to speak with his individual teachers have been rebuffed, at first with cordial good manners, then with eloquent terseness, and now with the simple refusal to take her calls.

Kate slides her fingers into her hair. She digs her fingertips into her scalp; her jaw muscles ache.

Miles, who will not accept instruction outside his bedroom.

She groans.

 _He’s a teen_ , said Mrs. Grose with a dismissive wave, _it’s part and parcel with the age, as I’m sure you remember, and besides...what does it matter as long as he completes his daily studies? And is he doing well? Is he excelling?_

And Kate nodded; she had to admit that yes, despite his sudden change in venue, the overall lack of supervision, and his penchant for sleeping half the day, he was doing quite well.

 _Then I wouldn’t waste a lot of worry on it_. Mrs. Grose continued folding her dishtowels, her voice gaining a note of finality. She glanced over her shoulder at Kate. _If I were you_.

Kate takes a deep breath. Lets her hands drop. She turns her head, looks out the window, through the filmy white curtains; the light’s stained purple by a thick overhang of clouds. A cold mist drizzles out of the sky, forms fat drops of water. They cling, leave rippling crystalline trails on the glass.

She sighs and opens a drawer, pulls out a tiny bottle of acetaminophen.

Miles’s transcript tells the story of a clever, if distractible, student---excellent scores on the tests he bothers to take, excellent grades on the papers he chooses to write, impressive contributions to the projects he shows up to work on.

Kate pops open the acetaminophen bottle. There’s a cold cup of tea off to one side; she shakes a couple of pills into her mouth, grabs the tea, gulps them down. She winces at the honeyed swampwater taste.

“Okay,” she murmurs, gathering up a sheaf of papers. “Let’s see, oh oracle of the Maine state educational system: what do you have to say about Miles?”

The papers are soft, worn into flexibility with much handling. She checks the date; the tests were administered right after his parents’ deaths.

“He’s got an exceptional aptitude in the language arts and soft sciences, he spoke three languages by age ten and displays a keen memory for words and rhythms. His musical competence, first detected in early childhood, spans wind, percussive, and stringed instruments.”

Her eyebrows lift.

“Okay.” She blows out a breath. “It’s Mr. Miles Poppins, who is practically perfect in every way.”

His latest psychiatric evaluation---conducted at the request of the Maine Office of Child and Family Services, following his first expulsion from school, three months after his parents died---tells a flip side: child shows hallmarks of persistent depression and grief, experiences anger outbursts, episodes of dissociation; examiner describes, following her interactions with him, a parentified child with indications of sexual precocity, though the child himself denies any abuse.

Kate skims the words, detects an understructure of PTSD lurking beneath his constellation of behaviors like ruins; she finds symptoms without anchors, behaviors without defined origins, a stark pattern of discernible gravity marking the empty place where something horrible should be.

 _While Quint only liked to watch Flora, who was not his favorite---I think he did a lot more than just watch Miles_.

Kate’s stomach shrinks, a queasy hum curling up underneath her ribs. A coldness wells up, fills her guts.

 _Taking the brunt of---what? It doesn’t matter, if it’s to spare the younger one_. An unsteady image of Flora flickers through her mind, dissembles at the slightest scrutiny. Blows apart, like dandelion fluff succumbing to the inevitability of breath. _The sister_.

The coldness turns to ice. It pulls her breath down, tumbles through her blood. Her sweat clings too hard.

 _Like Mariella did for you, even though it wasn’t enough_.

Kate’s throat spasms around a phantom gagging. For a dizzying second, her stomach screws up tight, threatens to launch; she takes in big breaths through her nose, forces her jittering belly muscles to hold them. Sweat swoons away from her skin. The heat creeps back in.

Her hands shake. The edges of the room loosen, threaten a slow ponderous spin. She scoops up the papers, re-orders them.

 _At least he’s in his last year of high school, so he’s able to do everything independently_. She slides the papers into neat stacks. _He’s done the math, the sciences, the sports credits via the equestrian bullshit, and he’s definitely overachieved in the foreign language department, so all that’s left is a Maine history credit, the English of course, some kind of art credit, and…_

She pulls in a shaky breath. Blinks water out of her eyes. Knuckles it away.

 _One elective_.

Every day, after lunch, Kate creates assignments for him. She arranges them with the materials he needs to complete them and carries them upstairs in a basket, leaves the basket outside his bedroom door. Sometimes she knocks once, with a single knuckle.

At the end of each day, just before dinner, she’ll retrieve the basket and carry it back down to her desk. Sometimes, she’ll find lists of books and other additional supplies. The following day she’ll drive into town, pick up what books she can at the tiny local library, buy what she can’t, order those she can’t buy through the bookshop.

Sometimes, there’s a handwritten note:

_I don’t think this is the correct edition---M._

_Shall I use Chicago style rather than ALA style---M_.

He doesn’t use the printed capital letters she would’ve expected, or the unraveling half-print, half-scrawl of the average teenage boy---he uses a script evolved out of the old-fashioned Palmer method, his loops mutated into lines, his proportions adjusted so the capitals exaggerate the beginnings of sentences while his lowercases tighten, each letter drawn in the clear and pronounced curl of an incoming wave.

It’s the handwriting of someone much older, that of a grandfather, a relic.

_There are more questions in the back, do you want answers for those as well---M._

_I know you specified four chapters, but I read all the way to the end---M_.

Most of the time there’s only that day’s work, each assignment tucked into its own labeled folder.

Kate wipes her nose, finds a tissue. She blows her nose and thumbs wet off her cheeks and crumples the tissue, tosses it into a wastecan.

She pushes the chair back.

She looks around the inside of the schoolroom, up at the cavernous ceiling, through exquisitely sculpted emptiness of it; the dark green brocade on the walls, the dark woods, the polish of it, it’s fussy organization, everything about the room spells out the kind of grandeur you have to be brought up to not notice. The status is in the absence of awareness, a cultivated ability to move through such a sculptured space, to occupy grandiosity without attachment or awareness.

The room, without Flora in it, is too quiet. Even the silence is intentional, a place meant for the display of sunlight captured by windows and cast over the meticulous arrangement of these objects.

Kate gets up. She pushes the chair in---anything to avoid disturbing the imposed order of the space, a virtue embodied to facilitate learning---and she walks from corner to corner, switches off each lamp, one at a time. Darkness drifts in. The windows offer lowering dusk, a blue alternative.

She enters the parlor. The only light in that room is firelight, competing with that of the tall windows. The blue on blue of the windowlight clashing with the walls turn gold drapes into shadow-forms. She goes to the ornate white marble fireplace, finds the switch, kills the gas; it robs the dimness of its wild disarray of shadows and its amber glaze, drains a flush of heat out of the room.

Kate buttons her thick blue cardigan all the way up.

Air wafts in from the kitchen, smells like butter, savoried fruit, caramelized blood, pepper.

“Dinner’s almost ready, I think.” She switches on a lamp. “Smells good.”

“It’s the mincemeat.” Flora’s curled up on a peach velvet fainting couch, her lap buried in a red wool blanket. There’s a coffee table book spread open over her thighs. “From last year.”

“Mincemeat?” Kate tilts her head, makes a puzzled face. “From last year?”

“Yeah.” Flora glances up. “Mrs. Grose makes a batch every year at this time. You’re supposed to eat the batch from last year before you make a new one, because it’s much better that way.” She turns a page. “Flavor-wise, I mean; it’s our mom’s recipe.” She shifts her position, glances over her shoulder. “I like it, but it’s one of Miles’s favorites.”

“Oh.” Kate blinks. “Cool, I’ve never had mincemeat.” Her mouth curves into a soft smile. “It sure does smell good, though.”

“It’ll be Miles’s birthday soon.” Flora adjusts the book on her lap. “It’s on Sunday.”

“I did not know that, I’ll…” Kate straightens out her sweater, glances toward the hallway. “I’ll have to say something to him.”

Flora keeps her eyes on her pages. She sounds bored. “We always wait until his birthday week to eat mincemeat.”

“Okay, but…” Kate takes a seat near her; her face is pink, her breath flustered. “Why not eat it on his birthday?”

Flora cuts her eyes to Kate’s face. Her eyebrows lift. “So he can have something different every year?”

“Oh...well, I can’t argue with that.” Kate laughs. “That makes sense.” She holds her knees together. “And do you have a special food for your birthday week, too?”

“Uh huh.” Flora nods. “That’s when Mrs. Grose makes the violet syrup.” She turns a page. “She makes sugar violets too, for my birthday cake.”

“Wow, that sounds beautiful _and_ delicious.” Kate grins. “And special, too. Like something out of a bedtime story.” She chuckles. “Fancy food for a fairy princess.”

Flora grins, starts to giggle. “That’s silly.”

“Maybe, but it sounds pretty special to me. Is that something your mom did for you, too? Like the mincemeat?”

“Yup, but when Mom did it, she made cupcakes instead of a whole cake. So I could take them to school with me.”

“Ah.” Kate nods. “And I bet that was so you could share them with your friends.”

“Uh huh!”

Kate softens her voice. “It sounds like she was a great mom.”

“She was the best,” Flora sighs. She curls tighter into the chair, pulls the blanket up under her arms. A softened, wheedling tone enters her voice. “Can you turn the fire back on?”

“Supper will be done here pretty soon, I think.” Kate stands. “It smells that way, anyway, so you should go wash up.”

Flora closes her book, slides it back onto the coffee table. She pushes the blanket off. Sighs. “Okay.”

 _She’s such a serious child_. Kate watches her scamper off. _Grave, even_. She picks up Flora’s abandoned blanket, folds it. She drapes it over the back of the couch. The wool is still warm. _Perhaps she was always that way. Some kids are_.

She heads for the hallway to the stairs. A little bit of the light from the kitchen escapes, crosses the parlor. The bulbs in the hallway sconces are dim.

She mounts the stairwell and its vaulted ceiling amplifies the cacophony of kitchen sounds: the refrigerator opening and closing, pots and pans entering the sink, quiet footfalls, the clatter of the opening silverware drawer, shuttering cupboards, the heavy hollow thunk of platters finding their rest, the gentle volume of an oldies radio station and Mrs. Grose singing along in a smooth alto voice--- _heavenly shades of night are falling, it’s twilight time_.

She crosses the landing. Upstairs it’s always dark, even during the day; she finds the corridor empty, deep red and copper-lit, the window at the end holding on to the last dregs of blue dusk.

The downstairs noise recedes into stony silence.

A wide flat blade of white light slips out beneath Miles’s bedroom door. She sees the basket, left beside its usual corner. She walks up to it, listens---she hears his acoustic guitar going, his fingers producing a tangle of chords she doesn’t recognize though some part of her mind wants to, feels like it should; he never sings, words never accompany the melodies he pulls out of the silence.

She stands still, leans closer. Closes her eyes.

 _I hear the Eagles in what he’s playing, that old stuff from the seventies---_ Peaceful Easy Feeling, _maybe, or_ Take It To The Limit--- _but I also hear a bit of Bob Dylan and a lot of that grungy stuff that’s everywhere now, a kind of artful noise, that almost-chaotic wall of sound to wail against_.

Kate squats, picks up the basket.

There’s a note folded on top.

Her heart skips a beat.

Her breath halts and her heart rate doubles to make up for it; her blood rushes to her skin, offloads a pile of heat. Her muscles loosen. Her palms sweat. She shakes her head, thinks about laughing at herself, then imagines what that might sound like---a pale breathy imitation of mirth with too much trembling caught in the throat, an offering of sound caught like a terrified animal in her teeth.

_It’s nothing._

_It’s nothing._

_It’s---_

Kate opens it.

It’s a handful of sentences, there’s no date, there’s no salutation, there’s no signature, even; his language is as careful and ruthless as ever, a simple petition to solve his elective credit requirement with a translation project.

She closes the note, purses her lips; she blows out a long loud stream of breath.

Behind the door, Miles trades his aimless noodling for a classical tune: Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you may listen to albinoni's adagio in g minor (guitar) [here](https://youtu.be/z4kGeOrDtAE)


	10. l'amant

Kate’s at the kitchen table with a plate of toast, looking over Miles’s schoolwork, when the telephone rings. The noise of it startles her, pulls her out of her mind; the rhythm, its stridence, reorients her attention to the room’s heavy load of silence.

She puts her pen down, glances at the clock.

 _Shit_. She jumps up, hurries to the phone. _It’s just past nine o’clock_.

“Hello, Fairchild residence.”

“Hello?” The feminine voice on the other end, smooth and warm, says it like _allo_. “Good evening, my name is Mireille Desjardins, am I speaking with Katherine Mandell?”

“Uh…yeah.” Kate nods. She glances out the window, at the dark. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“Please, Madame.” The warm voice chuckles. “I do hope that you’ll pardon the late hour, I’m afraid I don’t always have as much time during daylight hours as I would like.”

“No, no.” Kate shakes her head. “It’s fine, thank you so much for calling me back, it’s…” She sighs. “Well, it’s been very difficult to get anyone over there to talk to me.” She laughs and it sounds forced, too bright. “I had...well, just about given up to be honest.”

“I received your letter asking for assistance with one of Monsieur Fairchild’s assignments?”

“Yeah.” Kate twirls the long cord around her fingers. “I took French a long time ago.” She walks the length of the kitchen. “I’m afraid what limited proficiency I have is nowhere near up to this particular task.”

“It says here in your letter that he has taken, as an elective, the task of translating a work of French literature into English?”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“I see, and what is the work?”

“ _L’Amant_ , by Duras.”

A silence stretches out across the line.

“Mademoiselle Desjardins?” Kate stops, tilts her head toward the phone. Her eyes roam the neat cabinets. “Or is it Madame?”

“Did you assign this work to him?”

“Oh, no, I didn’t.” Kate leans her hip into the counter. “He wanted to; the whole thing was his idea.” She shakes her head. “He requested _L’Amant_.”

There’s another, shorter pause. “I see.”

Kate closes her eyes, sighs. “Okay.” Her mouth quirks in and out of a transient smile. Her eyes open. “What is it you’re not telling me?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I can help you.”

“What...wait, I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” Kate straightens. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No, of course not.”

“Look.” Kate takes a breath, wills calm into her voice. “It has been incredibly difficult to do my job with you and everyone else at your school absolutely refusing to cooperate with me in any way.” She paces the length and breadth of the kitchen, gesticulates with her free hand. “I’ve got a paper trail a mile wide on this kid, but when I try simple inquiries about his learning style, or how he is in class, or even this---just asking for help--- it’s just boom, hitting a wall.”

“Are you familiar with _L’Amant_ , Ms. Mandell? Or with Marguerite Duras, for that matter?”

“I’m not.” Kate walks to where she can see into the parlor. “I mean...I can translate the title, at least.”

“You know then that _l’amant_ translates to _the lover_.”

“Yes. I do, but other than that, I’m not familiar at all.” She turns her back. “Though I have at least heard of Marguerite Duras.”

“Had you said you assigned it to him, I would’ve been very surprised, considering the nature of the story. However, that you say he requested it does not surprise me at all.”

Kate walks to the refrigerator. She opens the door, squints at the cold white light. “What does that mean?”

“ _L’Amant_ is a story about a teen girl who embarks upon an affair with a man who is nearly twice her age.”

She reaches in, freezes. “Oh.”

“Yes. It is set in the 1930s, in Vietnam, though Vietnam was a French territory then, and it’s autofiction, it’s Duras’s fictionalized version of a life event that took place in her adolescence.”

“Okay.” Kate grabs a bottle of diet Coke. “Um.” Her face gets hot. “Are you saying that it’s...do you mean that it's, uh...inappropriate?” She twists open the bottle, reins in her voice. “That it’s too explicit for a teen boy?”

“I presume that you’ve read the psychological evaluation in his school records?”

Kate shuts the door. She takes a drink. “I have, yes.”

“While I might assign simple prurient interest to another child, I would take care and caution before assigning such to Miles Fairchild.”

“Okay, but…” Kate goes to take another drink, pauses. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I can’t say much more to you than that.”

“Well, okay...I suppose I should thank you.” Kate screws the cap back on. “But I need to know if you’ll help me or not.”

Silence.

“Mademois---Mada---” Kate shakes her head and draws in a deep breath, blows it out. She sets the bottle on the counter. “Mireille.” She softens her tone. “If I may call you that...please.” She half-turns and cradles the phone against her face, lowers her voice. “What happened?”

“You are teaching him at home, yes?”

“Well, I was hired to teach his much younger sister and _you_ \---meaning the school, specifically---were hired to teach him. But then the school expelled him, so now I have to teach him too.”

There’s a brief pause. “I see.”

“The headmaster called me.” Kate grabs a chair from the kitchen table, carries it into the kitchen. “The story I was told involved anger issues. When I asked Miles about it, he said that some kid burned the pictures his parents had sent him.” She plunks it down, takes a seat. “There was an incident of...physical violence, I was told by the headmaster that Miles beat this kid up pretty badly.” She grabs the soda bottle. “But I’ll be honest with you and say that I’m getting the very strong vibe---from _you_ \---that there’s way more to it than that.”

“There...was an incident.”

Kate’s mouth flattens. She tucks the phone between chin and shoulder, unscrews the cap.

“Yes.” Mireille clears her throat. “There was an incident involving interpersonal violence, I’m aware of it, but there was also another, separate from the one you’ve described to me. But before I continue, I want to assure you that despite the end result, things did not...well, shall we say, progress past a certain point.”

Kate’s body goes still. She grabs the receiver. “Things?”

“Our new English teacher, a young woman who came to us from one of the private liberal arts colleges, tendered her resignation the first week of October. She was quite young, inexperienced, perhaps unsuited to the post.”

Kate’s stomach lurches and the hand holding the receiver begins to sweat. Her scalp warms up. She closes her eyes.

“Now you must understand, you must realize, I heard of all this secondhand via a staff meeting.”

Kate keeps her voice calm. “Okay?”

“And you’ll have to forgive the rather sparse quality of my knowledge, but from what I was told, the impression I was given, it seems that Mr. Fairchild pursued an inappropriate relationship with this teacher, and that his pursuit of her culminated in an incident where he cornered her in an empty hallway and attempted to kiss her.”

Kate’s eyes widen. Her cheeks flame. Her mouth opens. “Oh.”

“This teacher resigned that evening and took her leave of the property the next morning. A staff meeting was called immediately, first thing that morning. We were informed of what had transpired, and we were asked not to discuss the details with students, friends, family members.” Mireille pauses. “We weren’t even to discuss it among ourselves.” She clears her throat. “There were non-disclosure agreements involved, Ms. Mandell.” There’s a pause. “I could lose my job for telling you this.”

“Oh, I appreciate you taking the risk.” Kate’s heart pounds. “Thank you.” She flashes a brief and tremulous smile. “This is...uh, rather handy information to have.”

“If you are still willing, in light of this information, to entertain accepting this sort of assignment from him, I will find you another local teacher to grade his work. I’m afraid that in light of my sharing this particular information, as much as I would like to help you, I cannot do it myself.”

“Yes, of course. Of course.” Kate’s hands tremble; she’s hot all over. “I understand completely.”

“I will refer your situation by letter to a colleague in Bangor who teaches French at St. John’s high school. He is a former student of mine who has been studying in Paris these last few years before returning home to teach. If he accepts, I’ll have him write to you directly.”

“That would be wonderful.” Kate closes her eyes. “Thank you so much.”

“Is there anything else I can do?”

“Yes.” Her eyes open. “If you’re willing to discuss it---I’m interested in knowing what sort of student Miles was, in your experience? Do you have any advice for me on the best way to teach him?”

“He’s very intelligent, as I’m sure you already know. He’s well-read and quieter in a classroom setting than you might think. When he does offer an answer, it’s thoughtful and well-reasoned.” There’s a slight pause. “I had no problems whatsoever with his conduct. In fact, he excelled in my class.”

“Do you miss him?”

“I-I’m…” Mireille reins in her flustered tone. “I am quite surprised that you would ask me that.”

Kate blinks. “Why?”

“I’ve said already that he’s very bright, which he is, but there is an uncontrolled---almost aggressive---quality to his intelligence that is, quite frankly, exhausting.” For a brief moment, her voice turns raw; it thins out, wavers at the end of a breath. “Or could be, would be, if you had ten additional minds to occupy, many of them excellent students in their own right with exacting educational demands of their own.”

“Yeah, I…” Kate lets out a soft, shaky laugh. “I concede your point. But I always missed a kid when they left my class, even if they were a pain in the ass.”

“I see...well.” She chuckles. “It was a pleasure speaking with you, Katherine.”

“Oh, thank you.” Kate stands, tucks the phone between her chin and shoulder. She wipes her wet palms on her jeans. “It was a pleasure speaking with you too.”

“ _Bonsoir_.”

“Good night.”

Kate exhales. She carries the phone to its cradle, hangs it up. At the click of it, her fingers unwinding, a weakness floods her body; it warms her skin, dampens her armpits, loosens her muscles. It wants to be a swoon. She won’t let it happen, refuses the spin creeping into her vision; she carries the chair back to the table, slumps herself into it.

Kate stretches out her legs. Her arms dangle. Her head lolls back, bends her throat into a heaving arch.

Somewhere over her head, far off, in the distant depths of the house, Miles plays his drums.

Kate closes her eyes.

Her blood thuds, fills her head with noise. She listens through the silence and for a brief moment, his tempo matches the strident beat of her heart; both bodies throb the same way, for a handful of counts, for different reasons, for a span of seconds.

 _Jesus Christ_.

She opens her eyes.


	11. just remember, darling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warnings this chapter for brief but detailed descriptions of child sexual abuse

Kate exhales through her nose, imagines a notebook---candles in the background, an old-fashioned pen scratching wet lines into paper:

_I left my mom at eight years old._

_She was ‘mentally unwell,’ she was crazy; she lived too far outside reality to take care of me._

_Her diagnosis is intractable paranoid schizophrenia. The intractable part means that she doesn’t respond to medication, so she has to live in a mental hospital._

_And I never knew my father; he left my mom when I was still a baby._

_So---I grew up in foster care_.

Kate’s eyes fly open and hot thorns fill her chest, wrap around her heart. They dig deep into her lungs.

_My foster father was a rapist._

_My foster sister was four years older than me; she traded herself, went out into the guesthouse with him, went off the property alone with him, to keep him off the other kids._

_Except he didn’t._

_He didn’t stay off the other kids_.

Her nose tingles, fills with snot. She sniffles, knuckles the stinging blur out of her eyes.

_I want to talk to you, Miles._

_May I talk to you?_

Her throat struggles, raws her breath; her chest caves in, her sternum crumpling, her ribs folding in on themselves.

_Flora called Mr. Quint a watcher._

_Did he watch you, too?_

She buries the noise of her breath in one forearm; she’s too hot, her flesh too tender, all of her vertebrae unstrung and cast adrift.

 _I know what it’s like to be watched_.

Her teeth ache. It hurts to fill herself with air; the hard pulse of her blood becomes too much to bear.

_To have greasy eyes on you all the time, searching for skin, studying the shapes of your body, longing for the loose silk of your hair, longing for the brittle snap a child makes when they break. Because breaking them is so easy, after all; they’re so little, so malleable, a child is a moving target and maybe that’s the real thrill---to bullseye a moving target, to blow apart something so small, it’s something a mean boy with a gun likes to do to squirrels and chipmunks, it’s such a worthless way to make yourself feel big. To give yourself power. To feel like a man._

_Did he do more?_

_I know what that’s like, too_.

Kate swallows, her throat spasming. She reaches across the table, pulls a notebook closer.

_When watchers stop watching, when they move on to what they can do with their hands, they take away so much._

_The first time it happened to me, I was nine._

_Mariella heard me sniffling, heard my teeth chattering in the night; when she found blood on my sheets she got me out of bed, threw away my stained nightgown, and drew me a hot bath. She sat on the cold tile beside the bathtub, held my hand as I cried. Mixed diaper cream and Bactine together, showed me how to rub it in so the pain would lessen. While helping me dry off, while helping me change into one of her old nightshirts, her eyes on the floor, she told me in a halting monotone murmur that if I sucked on his dick---if I offered him a blow job---he wouldn’t rape_.

Kate picks up a pen, clicks it open. Flips to a fresh sheet. Starts to write.

_I’d say something like---imagine that, but I don’t think I have to._

_When I was dry and dressed, we went downstairs together. It was a big house, nowhere near as big as this one, but big still the same---it was built in a New England style, with white shingles and black shutters, there was a circular driveway, they had hanging baskets full of petunias in summer, they kept horses in a back field---and the kitchen was big and shiny and quiet as a morgue._

_Mariella took a small cucumber out of the huge fridge, showed me how to do it. How to suck a dick. She told me what to expect, how to swallow the jizz without gagging._

_Then she took out a knife and cut it up. She bared her teeth. Used too much force. Growled._

_We salted the slices. Ate them. Giggled_.

Kate gnaws the clicker end of the pen.

_I left foster care at fourteen._

_I got out._

_Mariella, though---she didn’t_.

Her eyes leak; she swipes the underside of her jaw with the back of a hand, catches the droplets before they fall.

_I had a good social worker. She got me into a boarding school in Vermont, a good one if not a great one, and I spent my summers in a group home with a rotating group of other teen girls. I worked on farms and at an ice cream stand and at a country vet clinic and then as a camp counselor once I was old enough to drive; after I graduated, I went to college._

_I earned a master’s degree in early childhood education._

_I went back to New York._

_I found an apartment, a roommate. I got my first teaching job_.

The tendons in her hand ache, threaten to cramp.

_The first weekend I could, as soon as I had enough money, I took the train upstate to visit my mom. I was so excited, I couldn’t wait to see her after all those years, to tell her all the things I’d done, to show her how much I’d grown and what I was doing with my life._

_But, Miles...she didn’t recognize me._

_At all._

_I found out later, from the nurses, that she thought I was dead. She thought I was dead, that I had died, and that that was why we were no longer together; it was the story she told herself---a tragedy, sometimes it’s a bus accident and sometimes it’s a long illness, took me away from her, and the loss was too much for her mind to bear. It broke her._

_That’s what she says._

_She’s so busy making up a story, building this frame to hold her madness, weaving a narrative she can live with---that she can place blame on; she literally can’t see me, her eyes won’t work if it means giving up the comforting idea that she’s a victim of a horrible happenstance._

_I don’t know what it’s like to be orphaned, but I think maybe I can imagine it_.

Her lungs grow heavy and weak, so much that she feels them trying to keep her breath inside, feels them trying to pull her down.

_Mademoiselle---or Madame, she never told me---Desjardins called me. I had reached out to her because I need help with grading your French work, and instead of offering her help, she commented on your choice of literature and told me about the English teacher._

_The young one, she wouldn’t tell me her name. It happened this year, long before that boy burned your pictures and earned enough of your ire for your temper to get you kicked out of school; Mireille Desjardins told me you kissed your English teacher, or that you tried to kiss her, it wasn’t clear to her and it isn’t clear to me._

_But._

_Whatever you did, regardless of what actually happened, it chased her away._

_Is that what you want from me, too?_

_To be scared, to run away from you?_

Kate’s belly muscles clench and she pulls back, drops the pen like it’s hot. She shakes the tingling out of her hand.

_I’m sorry._

They’re strung way too tight; they struggle to hold back a bruised ache, a trembling throb of heat.

_I’m not._

She picks up the pen.

_I won’t._

Her inner thigh muscles twitch and she lets out a long sigh, lets her knees sag apart; sparks puff up into her belly, swirl around inside a trembling hollow space.

_I...can’t._

She stops and closes her eyes, listens into the silence of the house; she finds rain still slapping the glass, creaking radiators, a hint of wind muffled by the thick stone walls.

_I just---_

Miles’s drumbeat stops.

_\---thought you should know that._

_K._

Kate tears the sheet off the notebook, folds it in thirds. She finds where she left her purse and drags it up onto the table, unzips; inside is the French language copy of _L’Amant_ picked up this afternoon at the bookstore in town.

She pauses, looks at the folded-up paper. She bites her lip, picks up the pen. Writes his name on it. Tucks the note into the first page of the book’s introduction.

Kate pushes herself away from the table, hurries out of the kitchen; she dashes the length of the darkened hallway, jogs up the stairs; she breathes hard, the sweat breaking out among her hair roots, her palm turning slippery---she moves faster and faster until the exertion of her body outpaces the built-up adrenaline of her anxiety, until her heart pounds against the cage of her ribs like a wild animal, until her muscles are in too much pain to tremble.

She stops in front of Miles’s door. A slice of white light spreads out, fans into the dim from the gap running along the bottom. Her chest heaves, she looks at the book in her hand; it’s a paperback, the whole thing the size of his hand and slim as a journal.

Her heart pounds so hard that her whole throat throbs with it.

Her lungs burn.

Her ears ring.

Her hands start to shake.

She gets on one knee, shoves the book under the door.


	12. all the while

Kate takes shelter in her bedroom.

Closes the door.

Turns out the light.

Cracks the window.

Restless gray light floods the dark. The sheer white panels bell out, ripple thin as pond water. Black shapes of trees, spidery-thin, bend and clash with one another, their branches entangling; a sudden strong blast of tepid air flips the curtains apart, whistles between the sash and sill. The wind shrieks. Tattered clouds race the sky. A gust of rain scatters fine droplets through the screen, up her forearms.

 _Tropical air_. She kneels, leans her face into the gap.

“It wasn’t like this upstate at all,” she murmurs.

 _It makes the sky so violent_. Kate licks moisture off the back of her wrist, turns it over, sucks on her pulse. _It just sort of...muscles its way up from the south and shoves its way in, tears that stagnant body of frigid air apart_.

“I mean, we had lake effect sometimes. Sure.” She rests her hands on the sill, watches heavy whips of rain lash across the surface of the pool. The surrounding shrubs shudder, scatter broken twigs. “But not like this, every storm up here starts with...an effrontery, with offense.”

 _It comes like a how-dare-you, with cold declaring heat an interloper, with a challenge to duel and then a flat-out brawl_.

Kate stands up, takes a step back. She pulls her sweater off. It turns inside out and she tosses it into a chair.

The window’s air puffs along her bared skin, erodes her gathered heat; that hint of tropic heat still lingering all the way up here, provoking the half-frozen ocean currents with their shawls of ice-laden air into such a spectacular tantrum, is gentle. It carries heat away with such deftness, such softness, that her skin doesn’t think to kindle shivering, to marshal gooseflesh.

Her cotton camisole flattens over her ribs. It spreads across her belly, cups thin ripples around her breasts.

She listens to the door, to its stillness.

Wind flings itself against the window. The panes rattle. Her hair lifts up off her cheeks.

She thinks of the door, imagines it opening, that slow swing, his caution, a slant of light from the hallway spilling in and taking his shadow to absurd lengths before---what? A breath? A word? Some animal sound, a gasp or a grunt, a half-articulated syllable dropped before it has a chance to make something of itself? A measured silence?

An abandonment?

She pulls the camisole off, lets it drop onto the floor.

Kate becomes conscious of her breath. She searches the glass, finds the reflection of the bedroom door

Her nipples stiffen.

The hands in the glass find the waistband of her wool skirt. Her skin ripples heat at the touch, breaks out into languid gooseflesh; she licks her lips, watches their plump pink skin glisten. Her chest rises and falls. Her breasts rise too, soft and smooth, the air in her mouth cradled on the way down, borne back up through her throat and out her nose like an offering.

One hand drifts down, spreads open, comes to rest on her lower belly. She glances at her own eyes. Thumbs the thick rim of the skirt’s single tortoiseshell button.

Heat blooms behind her navel.

She guides the button through its hole. The fabric loosens into a sway, lets go of her waist. Brown bias-cut plaid puffs down.

The age of the glass distorts its movement. The lines of it undulate, turn it to a sinking, ripples cast out across a surface of water; her thighs emerge, too-white and skinny, bow-legged, her bony knees knobbly as a child’s but aged with silvered scars and tiny burst veins and discolored patches where the scraped-off pigment grew back in twice as dark.

The skirt curls into a pool on the floor.

 _I’m dizzy---no, not dizzy, floaty_. She blinks and there’s a halo of heat, a cloud of it hovering over her skin, the wind over the sash isn’t enough to prevent it from clinging to the inside perimeters of the window panes, to hold back the thin circle of vapor forced onto the glass by her mouth. _Adrift but warm, inviting, my muscles are floaty too, my body’s relaxing toward the promise of something_.

Kate tugs down her panties---old, faded pink, unraveled elastic, hip-hugging cotton---and kicks them aside.

Spilled air billows the curtains.

Rain taps and slaps and spatters the glass.

Silence.

Kate rubs the small swell of fat below her navel, cups a hand over her narrow triangle of pubic hair; it’s soft, downy, thinner than she would like---Mariella’s had been dense and puffy even at thirteen, it was a source of fierce girlish envy until Kate left for Vermont, everything about Mariella’s body frustrated her, that she should be gifted everywhere with such soft curvaceous abundance where Kate was scrawny and too pale, pinched in the face, her hair brittle as old straw from chronic malnourishment---and simmering heat, the skin beneath the hair is damp with sweat.

She bites her lip.

Glances up, watches as the woman in the glass does it too.

Her fingertips stray downward, stir the slit. She finds hair drenched and slippery and clinging to the skin; her eyes get bigger and she studies her face in the glass, the bright hot patches flaring to life over her cheekbones, the shimmery black of her dilated pupils, her rain-tossed hair. Her flushed nostrils. Her blushing mouth.

 _I’m all red_.

Kate blushes harder and she slides a finger into herself---her swollen lips part with a juicy-wet smooch; the silky grip of her hole, blood-packed and scalding, tightens. Hot slick gushes out, floods her knuckles. It buries the frantic throb of her hard clit, spills through her fingers. Her guts clench. Caught in her throat, held prisoner there, her breath trembles; she leaves a scatter of gleaming spots on the floor.

Her mouth opens.  
She gasps.

Her eyebrows knot. Her body shakes.

_Am I---?_

A surge of heat burns through her skin. Gooseflesh rises, crests up her limbs, spills down her back. Her breathing deepens, bursts out; her belly cramps.

“Fuck,” she whispers.

Her hips stutter. Her hole twitches, the tightness of her body pulsing around her finger; sharp bursts of crackling pleasure flare in her guts, simmer throughout her thighs.

She gets dizzy.

Her breathing slows.

Her thighs quiver to weakness.

Kate sags, new sweat gleaming on her skin.

She pulls her wet hand out of her crotch.

Too hot and half-delirious, her leg muscles softening to jelly, she stumbles to her bed and claws the covers back, slithers her way in; she keeps her eyes closed and her thighs clamped together and a low smoldering heat flares to life, a burning heart cradled by hips, her drowsy fire ravenous for bone. She yanks the sheet up over herself, shivers. The bedclothes writhe against her restless skin. Her eyes are parched, full of grit; she yearns to cry, to water them back to life, but all of her tears huddle beneath her breastbone, locked up tight by her ribs.

Her nostrils flare. She sniffles. Her mouth stings with thirst.

 _It’s okay_. She buries her mouth in her pillow and her eyelids tremble; she’s achy as an open wound, swollen with fever, her mind making circles out of salt. _It’s okay_.

Kate squirms around onto her stomach.

In a filmy dream, through a hot fog, she imagines it:

_The door creaking. It’s open, he enters the space, locks away the rest of the world and then the sound of his breath, just that---she knows it like she knows her own, could find it in a roomful of laboring chests, could parse it out of an entire chorus of lungs---is enough to curl her toes, clench her thighs, ripple through her breath. It’s enough to rouse the ripe hard thud of her blood. To wake the fire._

_The way he walks in, how he enters, his slow care, makes her think of scattered roses; it’s a reverence in the feet for the tender touch of petals, bruised perfume, a path made from door to bed---an invitation that requires sacrifice, the slow but hallowed death, to live._

_He carries his weight like a prayer._

_Unbuttons whatever he’s wearing._

_Rustles out of it_.

 _Kate thinks_ because words have no place in a daydream...until they do.

_He slithers into her bed, hot string of silk-padded bones, snake-demon, odor of musk and torn grass and warm milk, primitive tempter; he snugs up to her, winds along all the shapes and curves of her body---he glides a huge tight-strung hand up her shivering flank, caresses a breast. Cradles its slight weight. Plays with its stiff nipple._

Kate works a hand down between pubis and mattress, curls her wrist, shoves fingers up into her tight little well.

Her body clamps, rattles into new pleasure.

She gasps, her mouth stuffed full of cotton.

 _He says it to her scalp, his sharp hipbones digging undulations into her buttocks, his fingers scuttling down her belly to plunge into her pussy_ \---I need you. _His breath is everywhere, warm and soft and submerging her; his voice is husky, tight as a wire, fragile_ \---I want you so bad.

Her hips jerk, then shudder; her thighs push them up off the bed. She bends her arm, arches her back, rides her hand.

 _His fingers find her swollen channel, plunge inside; it spreads open tight between his big knuckles_. Please _he murmurs, his mouth soft and wet and hot on the back of her neck_ \---let me fuck you, I wanna be inside you so bad, please--- _he whines, brings his mouth close to her ear_ \---please, Katie.

“God, Miles,” she whispers, her flaming face buried in her pillow, her breath muffled, her head spinning; she half-moans, half-growls. “Fuck---f-fuck---oh fuck…”

 _He pushes her onto her belly_ \---let me make you feel good _he whispers, straddles her knees. His hands span her hipbones, he lifts them up off the bed, he kisses each knob of her backbone in a wet trail up the back of her neck_ \---I’ll make you feel so good.

A sharp burst of heat makes her hips jerk forward, makes her cry out.

 _His voice cracks_ \---I wanna make you come, please--- _he grabs his shaft, holds the head of his cock up against her hole, pushes in; it burns at first then deepens into a tight trembling ache, a sweet heat, a hungry clench_ \---let me make you come.

“Fuck,” she gasps.

You’re so fuckin tight--- _his breathing is ragged_ \---does that feel good?

Her fingers pump in and out. “Yes,” she whimpers.

 _He thrusts_.

Her hips scoop forward, snap hard against the erratic shove of her hand. “It feels good,” she whispers.

 _He grips her hips, slams into her; each breath is a grunt, a blast of air_.

“Miles,” she whispers.

Katie you feel so good--- _he whimpers it_ \---you feel so---fuckin---good.

She screams, the pillow ramming it back down her throat and vibrating it out through her flesh. She grits her teeth. Her back humps up, her muscles strung tight, her hips jerking; her pussy squeezes, her fingers slippery, the rim of her hole pulsing tight and hard as a heart.

She gushes. It fills her hand, soaks her wrist, wets the sheet.

Her legs shake. Her shoulders weaken. Her cheeks simmer with blood. She moans.

Her breathing slows. Her overheated skin slides into a gentle wake of sweat. Her mind drifts. Her limbs grow heavy.

Kate’s unaware of her own sleep when she’s brought out of it, gasping into the dark of a much later hour. She stirs out of her own dull aches, turns over; a narrow band of light slices in from the hallway, makes a thin gleaming fan across the floor.

A dank silence hangs over her bed.

 _The window_.

Her eyes seek and find its dimmed shape; she searches through the glass for signs of life. Wind rattles the panes. She glances at the rain-dampened floor.

 _It’s been shut_.

She sits up.


	13. thoroughbreds

Kate huddles in the phone booth. She holds the phone tight to her ear, stares through the cracked and cloudy glass at the bay.

The water’s calm, flattened, eerie, darkened to slate-gray beneath towering white banks of fog. Seagulls scream far out across the dull murmur of the water, their echoes distorted; the sky is a glaring shade of white, the morning light bright but brittle.

She listens to the phone ring.

“Hello?” There’s a brief pause. “Katie?”

“Yeah!” Kate’s startled into a laugh. “It’s me, hi.” She crooks the fingers of her free hand into a wave. “How’d you know?”

“I remember the Maine area code. It came up on the caller ID, and you’re the only person I know who lives in Maine, so...baboom, shazam, it’s another whole mystery solved.”

Kate chuckles.

“How are you?”

“I’m...I’m good!” Kate’s surprised at the honesty in her voice. “I’m doing really well, I mean…” She utters a manic little laugh. “I have so much money, you will not believe it. There are six digits sitting in my bank account right now.”

Stunned admiration fills Mariella’s voice. “No shit!”

“I know!” Kate shakes her head. “This job, Jesus...it pays.” Her eyes get bigger. “Like... _pays_.”

“Isn’t that cause the boy is a pain in the ass?”

Kate’s grin locks in place. “Maybe.” She rolls her eyes, chuckle-snorts. “Well...probably.” She laughs. “Okay, yeah.”

“What is his deal, anyway?”

“I guess he got kicked out of boarding school for beating some kid up, but...honestly?” Kate keeps her eyes on the water and the ear against the phone heats up, starts to throb. “The kid kinda had it coming, from what I’ve been told.” She shrugs. “He deliberately ruined all of Miles’s family photos.”

“Wow.” Mariella drags the word out, pulls it through several octaves. “I’m not gonna endorse the idea that violence is the answer, but…”

“Sometimes it is!” Kate’s voice comes out with too much force. “Exactly!”

“That shit is not okay.”

“It’s not, it’s really not.” Kate reins in her voice. “So anyway, I got paid all this money just to teach his sister, right? Then Miles came home unexpectedly and I got this huge check for him, too...I didn’t even have to, like, do a sad attempt at negotiation.” She lets out a high-pitched, manic string of giggles. “They just…” She snaps her fingers. “Doubled it.”

“How huge?”

“Eighty thousand. Per child.”

“Holy shit!”

Kate holds the phone with both hands. She glances at her parked car. “Plus they paid off all my loans?”

“Holy crap.” Mariella’s voice turns conspiratorial. “Are you fuckin serious?”

“I am totally fuckin serious.”

“Even Columbia?”

“Even Columbia!”

Mariella puts on her best deep stoner Keanu Reeves voice. “Whoa.”

“I know!” Kate screeches, jumps up and down. “I have...no school debt right now.” Her voice quivers with incredulous mirth. “I could buy a...a-a house if I wanted to, just walk into a realtor and...write a check for it. Cha-ching, done. Boom,” she gushes. “This is...absolutely...un _real_.”

“So...are you going to? Buy a house?”

“I don’t think so.” Kate’s lips tremble around a restrained laugh. “I mean, at least not _this_ year?” A quick hard scatter of giggles bursts out of her. “I _think_?”

“How about the Woodstock money, then? Did the Warbucks Estate pay that too?”

“No, no, I did.” Wind comes in off the water and Kate turns her back on the gap in the booth. “The total was sixty grand, which _still_ left me a hundred.”

“Hot damn.”

“No, no.” Kate holds up a hand, forces solemnity into her voice. “No. A mere hot damn could never suffice. It is the _hottest_ of damns.”

There’s a lightning-quick beat of silence, a breath, and they both burst out into frantic stereophonic giggling.

“But how’s everything else, though?” Mariella’s laughter trails off, calms down; it energizes her voice. “The job?” Her enunciation strengthens. “In your last letter, and the letter before that, you weren’t sure about staying.”

“Well, it’s…” Kate twists her mouth. She narrows her eyes, seesaws a hand in the air. “You know, there’s an adjustment period. That’s how it goes. I had to get to know the kids better, I had to find a rhythm, I had to learn my way around the area...all that stuff.”

Mariella chuckles a little and uses it to ramp her voice down into something mellow, calm, and measured. “I recall that you weren’t sure about Miles.”

“I…” Kate’s face erupts into a vicious blush and her breath rushes out. “He stays in his room about ninety percent of the time.” The skin on her cheeks throbs. “I guess in the end he decided that tormenting me wasn’t worth the effort.” She turns her head toward the gap in the booth. “He sleeps until noon.” The chilly wind blasts her cheeks. “He never comes out, he has all his meals taken upstairs on a tray.”

“Sounds like maybe he’s avoiding you.”

Kate rests ice cold knuckles on her hot face. Her voice loses strength. “Maybe?”

“How old is he again?”

“Seventeen.” Kate glances at the bay. “Tomorrow, actually.” The wind scrapes over the slaty surface, plows up thin white waves. “Tomorrow’s his seventeenth birthday.”

“You in town shopping for streamers and balloons, then? Is there a house full of lanky pimple-ridden teenage stinkbeasts, bad movies, and too much pizza in your future?”

“No...God.” Kate laughs, then groans, then laughs again. “No, it’s nothing like that. I did do some shopping, but not party shopping.” She puts on a fruity-thick English accent. “They’re thoroughbreds, Ellie.” She giggles. “Pizza is for peasants.”

“Can an adolescent even successfully reach adulthood without a steady diet of pizza?”

“I don’t know, but I guess I’m going to find out.”

“Is he at least going to have some friends over?”

“Miles doesn’t really have any friends? I mean...I guess I don’t really know, but if he does they don’t live around here. Like I told you, he nevers comes out...he just...just stays in his room and plays music all day.”

“Oh, I see. So he’s like _that_.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s one of those.”

“Um...so it would seem?”

“He any good?”

“He is, actually. I was surprised. He’s got quite a range; he plays piano, guitar, and drums very well.”

“Wow.” Mariella’s voice is dry. “Dreamy,” she drawls.

“Not dreamy enough, apparently.” Kate unzips her coat, loosens her scarf. “Because there sure aren’t any girls hanging around, or burning up the phone lines. No boys, either.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean...he must be a really huge dick because even your average-sized wieners still manage to scrape themselves up a tiny little posse of asshole friends.”

“He’s not _that_ bad.” Kate shoves the exasperation out of her voice. “I mean…” She takes a breath, holds it; she closes her eyes, gentles her tone. “Not once you get to know him.”

Mariella chuckles. “Is he cute?”

“He’s seventeen,” Kate huffs.

“So? You used to be seventeen.” Mariella giggles. “I remember it well.”

“Yeah, thirteen years ago.”

“You’re not exactly ready for the nursing home, Katie.”

“He’s supposed to be my student.”

“Supposed to be? Wow...because that isn’t interesting language.”

“Well, I mean---I don’t really _teach_ him anything, I just correct his essays and look over his other work. But he still carries student status, he’s still in high school, even though he’s mostly teaching himself.”

“But your eyes still work?”

“He’s not...I mean he’s not...unattractive, he’s…” Kate struggles to rein in her sputtering. “I don’t know.” Her heart pounds. “I’m not the best judge, I mean...what do modern teen girls even _like_?”

“I don’t think generic hot standards change that much with time.”

“He’s not...a hideous monster, if you want to know whether or not there’s an obvious physical reason why he’s got no girls chasing him.”

“So he’s just a little penis, then.”

“There _was_ a lot of pushback at first.” Kate pulls the scarf off, drapes it over one arm. “So yeah, he knows how to be a dick. But if you respect his extra prickly boundaries, you seem to be...okay.”

“Seem to be?”

“I’ve provided the respect, he’s provided the backing off, so…” Kate shrugs, breathes in through her nose. “Yeah.”

“All right.”

“He’s been through a lot.” Kate winces at the throb of tenderness in her voice. “I’m just trying to cut him some slack, you know?”

“So what does a seventeen-year-old stuck in a Henry James novel do for his birthday, anyway?”

“The housekeeper makes him some fancy meal, and a fancy cake, and Flora writes a letter to the conservator, who then buys whatever gifts she wants to give him and has them gift-wrapped and delivered to the house.”

“Ugh.”

“But Ellie.” The fruity British accent returns, turns slow and sweet as honey. “That is the proper way to execute a Fairchild family birthday.”

“Has he ever even _had_ pizza?”

“I don’t know!” Kate bursts out laughing. “This is not a thing that comes up between conversations about French literature and Maine history!”

“Get Domino’s to deliver. I mean, you gotta start him out all the way at the bottom of the trash ladder. Break him in properly.”

“This is the north forty, Ell. There’s no Domino’s here.”

“Every place has some kind of greasy pizzeria, so go with that, but...but but but! You must _only_ let it through the door if it’s absolutely smothered with oily meat.”

Kate laughs so hard she can’t breathe.

“I mean I know you can’t order him up some friends too, which sucks hard, because a pizza party would be so much cooler than all that prim-ass Julia Child _au français_ linen napkin-draped crap.”

“Stop.” Kate’s wheezing. “I don’t want to die in this phone booth!”

“But it’s death by mirth! In a lovely oceanfront phone booth, even!”

Kate doubles over, laughs so hard that she doesn’t make any noise. “Stawwwp!”

“Okay...okay.” Mariella takes a deep breath, chuckles it out. “I’ll be serious, I promise.”

Kate stands, leans into the booth. She’s still breathing hard. “You will not.”

“Pinky fucking swear, okay. I am one hundred percent solemn. Take a breath. Breathe in my voice. Taste the gravitas.”

“All right, all right.”

A companionable silence fills the line.

“I think you should get Miles some pizza for his birthday.”

“Yeah.” Kate nods, her voice tight and brittle. “I got that.”

“What? Do you think I’m wrong?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Is he lactose intolerant? Would a breach of their weird food etiquette get you fired?”

“No...I don’t think so.” Kate sighs. “I don’t know, I just...feel odd, like I’m stepping all over their family traditions. Maybe they don’t even like pizza. Maybe it’s not this big mystery after all.”

“I don’t think that’s stepping all over anything, I mean...why can’t you do both? Pizza for lunch, those fussy little cakes for tea, haute cuisine for dinner.”

Kate shrugs. “I guess that’s true.”

“Don’t you think they might feel left out, like they’re not allowed to eat like other kids?”

“I don’t, I never did, I...just accepted that they eat French apple tarts and bouillabaisse rather than Happy Meals and pizza because that’s what they like.”

There’s a silence.

“But...you’re probably right,” Kate sighs. “Of course you’re right.”

“They sound like very lonely children, Katie.”

“Yeah.” Kate swallows. “They are.”

“You know they’re lucky to have you, right?”

“I hope so.” Her eyes sting. “I’m...I’m doing my best.”

“Of course you are! You’re Katherine Motherfucking Mandell! The biggest baddest bitch in any classroom!”

Kate blushes. She grins. She starts to giggle, wipes her wet eyes.

“I mean...you’re worth a hundred and sixty thousand dollars! Boom! That’s some gold-plated badassery. Absolute top shelf.”

“Thanks, Ellie.” Kate hugs herself. “I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome.”

“So...how are you?” She sniffles, wipes her nostrils with a thumb. “I’m boring.”

“Not as boring as me, I promise.”

“Oh come on, I doubt that. How’s Andy? How’s Elena? I mean, she must be huge by now?”

“Huge, walking, talking, terrifying our cats, leaving food _everywhere_...yeah. Life around here is energetic. And exhausting...we’re not sleeping right now, for some arcane reason. Nightmares. The latest one, I think, has something to do with toddler-eating trash cans. That’s the most I can decipher during this, Elena’s mushmouth stage, when I haven’t had three consecutive hours of sleep in forty-eight hours.”

“Oh no!” Kate laughs. “Not toddler-eating trash cans!”

“The horror, the horror.”

“And Andy? Don’t tell me the trash cans are eating her too?”

“They better not, I’ll fight those bitches. Nobody eats Andy but me.”

Kate giggles, claps a hand over her mouth. “Oh my God.”

“What? _What_? Do I have to explain the ins and outs---well, the licky-licks---of lesbo sex to you? _Again_?”

“No, God!” Kate waves a hand around her pink face. “I just...I don’t know.”

“You’re so cute.”

Kate gives the receiver the finger. “Fuck you.”

“Prudish, but cute.”

“I am not a prude! I like sex, I just...get embarrassed, I guess.” Kate rolls her eyes. “I know it’s kinda babyish. It’s private.” She closes her eyes, pushes a hand away from her face. “I do not need those images in my head.”

“It’s not like there’s a lot of room at this point. It’s gotta be pretty crowded in there by now.”

“I mean...I was gonna _say_ that, but---”

“It’s fine, it’s fine, I’m a slut.” Mariella’s voice turns lofty. “A mouthy one. An EE-ROT-TICK storyteller. I know it. Or I used to be, at least.”

“You still are, just the cast has gotten smaller.”

“A lot smaller.”

“Yeah.” Kate smiles, softens her voice. “Andy’s pretty great.”

“She’s the best.”

“She makes you happy and that’s what I care about.”

Silence.

“So...why’d you call? If you’re not piggybacking on errands and made a special trip, you have to be freezing by now, and I know you don’t do anything without a reason.”

“I’m not, I finally bought myself a decent coat!” Kate glances around at the tattering fog, the brightening morning light. “And the weather’s not too bad, it finally stopped raining. But...I wanted to know if I can still visit for Thanksgiving?”

“Yes!” Mariella shrieks. “Oh my God!” She claps her hands. “Absolutely!”

“I mean, I’ve got enough money to travel now, and---”

“Andy!” Mariella covers the receiver, yells into the background. “Katie’s gonna be here for Thanksgiving!”

“---you told me I’m always welcome, so---”

“Oh my God, this is going to be the best time ever.” Mariella’s hand rustles away from her phone and her voice comes in clearer. “The fucking best. How much time can you get?”

Kate’s confused. “What?”

“How much time? _Time_?”

She wrinkles her brow, shakes her head. “Wh---”

“You know... _vacation_ time? How long will they allow you to be physically away from Damien and Little Orphan Flora?”

“Oh! I don’t...not more than a few days, I think. I don’t dare to ask for more than four, honestly.”

“But that’s two travel days.”

“Yeah, I know, but it’s a...a governess job too, sort of. I really think asking for more than four days is pushing it.”

“Boo.”

“I know, I know.”

“I understand and all, I do, but... _boo_!”

“Damien?” Kate’s eyebrows lift. “Little Orphan Flora?” She grins. “Really?”

“Governess? Did you actually just use that word?”

Kate snorts, bursts out laughing. “I guess I did.”

“I guess you did.” Mariella giggles. “Shall I call you Jane?”

“No!”

“Oh Miss Eyre, Miss Eyre! Do beware the crazy woman in the attic.”

Kate’s giggling. “Fuck you.”

“Alas, though, there shall be no Mr. Rochester for you.”

“I know, I know.” Kate heaves a sigh. “It’s so disappointing, really.”

“Anyway, I’m gonna let you go. Andie’s headed out to work and I’ve gotta go pump my boobs, and before you ask, I’m still lactating because I am a freaking milk machine and I’ve got this friend from the hospital who had a preemie in the spring and needs all the milk she can get? Call me when you’ve got your flights sorted out. Or I can call you, I’ve got the number here somewhere.”

“Okay.” Kate nods. “Yeah, I can do that. I should…” She sighs, chuckles. “I should go do that.”

“Take care of yourself, okay?”

“I am. I will. You too, okay?”

“I take it a day at a time.”

“As always.”

“As always.

“Love you!”

“I love you too.”

Kate listens to the click, the changeover to artificial silence.

She hangs up the phone and steps out of the booth. A blast of raw air wraps around her, thick with a scent of seaweed; it peels away her accumulated warmth in layers, hauls a fresh shiver of gooseflesh up her spine.

She goes to her car and climbs in, turns on the engine; the vents blast into immediate life and she closes her eyes, her head aching, her face aching. She ignores the tears when they slide down her hot cheeks.

She takes a breath.

Her chest is tight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for taking so long BUT this chapter was a suckfest to write & i lost a lot of time freaking out over my sick son whom i THOUGHT had covid but just had a regular old strep throat instead (thank g-d)
> 
> merry xmas to those who celebrate :>)


	14. 12 November 1994

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **WARNINGS THIS CHAPTER for graphic descriptions of emotional abuse, physical abuse, grooming, and child sexual abuse**. When I say graphic, I'm not fucking around. This chapter contains some extremely triggering shit. Please take care of yourselves.

_12 November 1994_

_Dear Kate,_

_Last night, I came to your room. I knocked, though the door had been left open, and when I walked in, I found you asleep._

_Yes. I am the one who closed the window._

_I received your letter. I wanted to talk to you, instead of doing this. But I felt it would be rude of me to wake you just for that._

_But then I found myself back in my bedroom, in the dark, sitting on my bed, left with my own thoughts._

_Yes. You may talk to me._

_Yes. Talk to me whenever you like, whenever you want. Just tell me when. Let me know. I will find time for you. Show me where. I will make time for you._

_I don’t know if the things I could say to you can be written down. If words can do the things I want them to. Language is too fragile to carry certain things. Their shapes can be described and so can the scars they leave behind. You can give directions to where the shadows are, but the finding happens off the paper._

_My father loved me, I believe that, but he wished for me to be something different. Bigger. Meaner. He had violent fantasies about my future. He wanted me to be a brawler. To fight for things, to use my fists, to avenge personal slights._

_I don’t understand it. My father was nothing like that. He grew up playing piano and doing chess competitions and learning ballroom dancing; his true joy in life was making beautiful things, he designed jewelry for my mother, he built her a house on an island, he hand-carved Flora’s bed._

_I guess I’m more like him than I want to be._

_I can see it better, now that I’m older._

_Anyway, that’s why he hired Quint. The true reason. It wasn’t to teach me how to ride. I already knew._

_Quint---Peter---he would hit me when I fucked up. That was what my father asked of him. What he told him to do. What he wanted. He said it would make me tough._

_So Peter would hit me across the face at first, with his hand, because that's what you do with a girl, a little bitch. I’d get scared and cry, and back then I was little and skinny. I was so small at first, so light, that when Peter backhanded me I’d go flying. He’d smack me upside the head and knock me right off my feet._

_When I got bigger, he’d use the whip. On my back mostly, but sometimes on my butt and thighs. He’d whip me for showing bad form. He’d whip me for letting Mrs. Grose tell me what to do. He’d whip me for getting into a fight at school without spilling anyone’s blood. He’d even whip me if I showed Flora too much affection, if he thought I let my mom hold me for too long. He was very good at it. He could crack it behind your head loud enough to make you jump. He could redden the skin and not bruise it. He could bruise the skin and not break it._

_Then my parents died._

_It happened in the winter. There was an ice storm. I don’t know if you get ice storms in New York, but they happen up here a lot. They happen when the ground gets cold enough to freeze the rain. The rain has to be cold too, almost cold enough to turn into snow. The rain freezes the second it makes contact with the ground and makes a layer of ice that glazes everything. It can be beautiful when it’s a thin crystalline layer, but dangerous when it’s thick and heavy enough to bend trees and pull down power lines._

_My dad lost control of the car and it hit a tree. The heavy ice fall had weakened one of the big old branches and the impact of the car broke the whole thing off. It fell on the roof of the car._

_They weren’t even going that fast. He was careful. But that old tree, with its one big half-rotten branch, the accumulated ice---it collapsed the roof and broke both of their necks. That’s what the pathology report says. Mrs. Stern---she's the conservator of the estate, and probably the person who hired you---let me read it when I turned sixteen. Hitting the tree itself only caused minor injuries. The accident report estimated that the car’s traveling speed at impact was between ten and twenty miles per hour._

_Once my parents were out of the picture, I was left alone with Peter._

_I was twelve years old the year my parents died._

_That was also the year Peter, stumble-drunk and stinking of liquor, staggered into my bedroom in the middle of the night._

_He was so drunk, Kate. He moved like a marionette with slack strings. He smelled like old gym socks and a barroom floor that hadn’t been cleaned in a week. He could barely form words, let alone string sentences together._

_He crawled onto my bed and sprawled on top of my covers and slumped against the wall and slurred at me about Flora’s new governess. I didn’t understand. I thought she was pretty, and she was kind to me, and she was so sweet to my sister._

_I was scared of him that night but I was a little flattered; it felt like when my school friends would wait until lights out to sneak into my room to complain about teachers and grades. I had no idea what the word slut meant, or whore, or what a cock tease was. It was like struggling to comprehend a whole other dialect of English._

_Then he put his hand down my pajama pants. I froze, didn’t want him to, the idea made my skin crawl. It made me sick to my stomach. But I was too terrified of the whip to say anything._

_It’s embarrassing to admit it, especially to you, but...once he started, it felt good. I had stroked my own cock before, but his hand felt different. It was bigger, stronger, and it knew a lot more about jerking off than mine did._

_He laughed at me when I came._

_He said...congratulations._

_He said...welcome to manhood._

_That was the first and last time Peter put his hands on me._

_After that, he started picking up women. I don’t know where he found them, or how far he went to find the right kind of bar, but they weren’t townies. Mrs. Grose hated it. She and Peter fought all the time over his overnight guests but he wouldn’t stop. He’d wait until she’d gone to bed---this was back when Mr. Grose was still alive, and they lived together in the apartment over the garage---and he’d sneak them up to my parents’ old room and make me hide in the closet and watch through a hole in the door while he fucked them._

_But it wasn’t enough to just watch._

_Of course it wasn’t._

_He wanted me to pay close attention, to study what I saw. To him, in his mind, what he was doing counted as instruction. That’s how he justified it: he was teaching me something. He made me describe to him, in as much detail as I could, everything I saw: what he did, what he said, what his body looked like, what she did, what she said, how her body moved. What the bed sounded like. What their voices did. The way individual acts looked._

_He got off on it, of course. He liked making me talk about it. But I ignored it, the way he’d touch his dick while I spoke. I’d raise my voice over the noise of his rough breath, recite the facts._

_Like my father, I’m a very good student._

_Like my mother, I have an exceptional memory._

_I sat in that closet night after night with a penlight and a notebook and I documented every single sexual encounter like it was a laboratory experiment. I watched them through the hole like they were animals acting out behaviors in a cage. I broke what I saw down to its simplest elements---motion, sound, composition---and translated it into data. I still have them, as a matter of fact; single-subject notebooks hidden away and filled with penciled diagrams, sketches, handwritten descriptions of things._

_Most of the women were some degree of drunk._

_All of them went to bed with him willingly._

_There are eleven notebooks in total. I’m not proud of it but somewhere in the basement packed away with my younger kid things is the only known copy of one eleven volume encyclopedia detailing the sexual habits and performances of one Peter Quint._

_He got bored with instruction by observation soon enough. I think my notebooks made him angry._

_After I turned thirteen, Peter found Elizabeth._

_She was forty-nine years old._

_I want you to imagine a pair of skeletal white hands wrapped in mushy blue veins. Glossy nails. Knobby wrists. Stacks of bejeweled rings. Her thick flat curtain of white-blonde hair hanging over one bony shoulder like a palomino’s mane. This lanky scarecrow bitch with her bored blue eyes, serpentine hips, and a slanted bloodless wound for a mouth. Her naked body gaunt but tight. Her long hollow horse face with its jutting white chiclet teeth set in smoker’s gums. Her stacks of thick gold and silver bracelets._

_She had a Vassar voice spiderwebbed with cigarette cracks. She wore fur coats in winter. She dressed like a Greek goddess. She wore pearls to bed and nothing else._

_Elizabeth, who wanted a twelve-year-old._

_Elizabeth, who constantly voiced her old-money gilded distaste for the ruinous effect puberty was having on my face._

_Her mean little mouth tasted like an ashtray brimming with snot._

_Her too-soft skin was thin as a corpse’s and always smelled sickly-sweet, like too many flowers in a funeral home._

_Eating her pussy was like sliding my tongue around inside a loose chicken skin that had spent the night floating in a day-old cup of black coffee._

_I hated her._

_Peter would drive me to her house. We’d get in the truck, leave Flora with the governess of the month. It took a while to get there, but how long was impossible to discern. Before leaving the property, he put a blindfold on me. I think maybe she lived somewhere in Bar Harbor. I think she probably paid Peter a lot of money._

_He’d park the truck and help me out of it and walk me through a windy place where breakers crashed endlessly against rocks. He’d lead me to an inside place. And when he took the blindfold off, it was always in the same room: all-white, a huge bedroom with a wall of plate glass windows and breathtaking ocean views._

_The furniture was all in shades of white too, geometric, white as she was and just as stripped of padding, too angular, dressed in fur and velvet and silk. Peter always sat in the same big corner chair, a reading chair, sprawled out and much too comfortable. He looked smeared there, rubbed in, like a big brown stain. He always cupped an expensive whiskey in his left hand. He always leaned forward and kept his eyes on me, breathing through his mouth, mesmerized._

_I hated him, too._

_I was thankful that Elizabeth’s tastes---aside from her preference for 12-year-old boys, of course---were ordinary, almost boring. The first time I met her, reclining naked in the center of that big white room, she told me with her bored and rasped-up drunk’s voice that while other people had far more sadistic tastes, from her hands I could expect nothing but tenderness._

_I think that was her way of trying to calm me, to soothe. To gentle me down like a spooked horse. She’d been treating herself to twelve-year-old boys for a long time, and I think a lot of them trembled at their first glimpse of her naked voraciousness, her incredible blasé ugliness, with an indescribable terror. I think some of them tried to run. I think most of them cried._

_Then Peter died, and I never saw Elizabeth again._

_But before that, Peter said things to me about my sister._

_Disgusting things about her body._

_About her mouth._

_The official story about Peter’s death is that he rode Samson at night, while drunk, and slipped out of the saddle. That he’d failed to secure his tack. That he was too drunk to sit the saddle to begin with and had fallen out of it and hit the ground and broken his neck._

_But the truth is a lot different._

_If you ask me, I’ll tell you how I did it._

_It’ll hurt me, it’ll make me cry, but I’ll tell you how I fucked it all up, that despite all of my careful planning he didn’t die alone, in the dark, in the mud, like I wanted him to._

_I couldn’t let him do to Flora what he was doing to me. I couldn’t let him do worse than that. I knew, deep down, that he wanted her for himself. That he’d use her. Rape her. Destroy her._

_But I couldn’t even do that right._

_The fall broke his neck, but it didn’t paralyze him. He managed, somehow, against all odds, in light of his severe injuries, to drag himself all the way back to the house._

_Mrs. Grose found him in the foyer._

_And she left him there._

_Instead of losing her cool, instead of calling an ambulance, she went out the kitchen door and stood in the back garden. She lit a cigarette. Then she waited. She might’ve thought about having another cigarette while the first one burned down but she watched the dark get deeper instead. It started to rain. When she was soaked and freezing, her teeth chattering, she went back inside._

_And she found me, crying over his body and touching his hands, like I loved him, like it was grief, but it wasn't. I didn’t. It was true, I couldn’t stop touching him, but it was to make sure he kept getting colder. I sobbed when she pulled me away, but it was because I was overcome with gratitude._

_He’d never whip me again._

_He’d never sell me again._

_And he’d never put his filthy fucking callused-up perverted commoner’s hands on my sister._

_No one came to claim his body, so the estate ended up paying to have him cremated. Mrs. Grose doesn’t know it, but I watched her break the urn open. She dumped his ashes in the toilet._

_Now...I want to tell you about my mother._

_Maybe I can end this letter on a better note, a sweeter note._

_Missing her, it’s like a weight that lives in my skin. Sometimes it’s warm, an itch, the fleeting reminder that I came out of her, that she used to exist. It doesn’t hurt as much as it used to, I don’t see her in my mind as much as I used to. Not in pictures and light, anyway. These days I remember her with my skin, in sensations. When I feel it in my hands, I like to play the piano. It eases the weight, makes it easier to sleep._

_Listening to me play was one of her favorite things._

_I don’t know if spirits are real, if there’s any kind of life after death. I mean, I hope there is and pray there isn’t---while I still want my mom, and I wish I could hear even just a whisper of her voice, or could smell just a whiff of the special perfume she used to wear mixing in with the scent of her skin, I pray that people like Quint---like Elizabeth---aren’t allowed any sort of existence beyond the body._

_She was such a good mom._

_People sometimes have ideas about her._

_You know, because she was a rich mom._

_She was a cultivated woman who hailed from a rich place, you knew it the minute you set eyes on her, by the figure she cut and the rhythms of her voice: she was shaped by generations of conscientious, hand-selected breeding._

_You know the ideas I’m talking about---that her children were an inconvenience, that she tossed us to a parade of nannies to raise, that her life was about curating a sequence of increasingly expensive and rarefied possessions, that she was so occupied with luncheons and dalliances with hot servant boys and self-aggrandizing charity work to bother caring for us with her own two hands._

_None of that’s true, though._

_She was a great mom._

_I miss her so much._

_Love,_

_Miles._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am so so sorry...this might be the most upsetting thing i've ever written, it cost me a not inconsiderable amount of tears & a half a day of nausea
> 
> i may need to take a break from this story for awhile
> 
> xoxox


	15. bar harbor

_Today is Miles’s birthday_ , Flora whispered that morning, balanced up on her tiptoes. Her chilly little hand curled around Kate’s ear. _Did you forget?_

Kate glances at the speedometer, flexes her fingers on the wheel. Her eyes follow the hills and curves of the upcoming road.

 _No, I didn’t forget_. Kate’s smile was strained; she glanced at Flora, did her best to soften it. _But I will be out for most of the day, I’m afraid. I have things to do_.

 _Like…_ Flora’s smile turned sly. She lifted an eyebrow. _Pick up presents?_

 _Maaaybe_. Kate grinned around the raw ache in her chest, dipped her face to take a long drink. She hid the tremulousness of her smile behind the cup’s sturdy rim. _But I’ll never tell_.

 _Okay_. Flora giggled, spun herself into a delighted twirl. _I promise to keep your secret_.

Bickering too-polished radio voices dig into Kate’s brain and she fiddles with the preset buttons for a handful of seconds before spinning the knob into the off-click. She fingers the tape slot, finds it empty. Slaps the wheel. Drops back into the seat. Huffs out a sharp sigh.

_Where shall I say you are? You know, when Miles asks for you?_

_I don’t know, what would be easiest for him to believe?_

_You want me to make up my best lie, then?_

_If we’re going to be co-conspirators, then we have to cover up each other’s tracks._

_Then I shall say that...you’ve gone off to Bangor all day to buy a new car._

_Wow, that’s a pretty good cover story. A shockingly grown-up cover story. How did you think of it?_

_That’s what Mr. Grose would say when he was gone all day. He only sometimes bought a car, though. So if you don’t feel like buying a new car today, and you come home in your old one, he’ll still believe it._

_You are extraordinarily clever, Flora Fairchild. You and I should conspire together more often._

_Miles likes those raspberry cordials at the candy store in the mall. The ones that come from France. Make sure they’re the dark chocolate ones, though._

_I will keep that in mind, clever girl. Thank you._

_You’re welcome!_

She finds her way back to route one and follows it south to Bar Harbor even though it’s an overcast November morning full of sullen wind and shifting gray light; it feels empty there, liminal, a picturesque town as hollowed and flayed by the passage of time as a corpse left to rot in the water. Waxing winterlight dulls jumbled-together storefronts, grimes their jewel-toned faces. The harbor---a striking cobalt laced with white foam underneath an Independence Day sky---lies beneath the dimming clouds, still as a sheet of silver left to blacken.

Kate drives the empty streets, the steering wheel held in a vice-grip, her mouth dry, the car slowed to a crawl; her eyes dart from one flicker of movement to the next, follow pairs of autumn-clad legs up sidewalks.

Her heart pounds, her ribs sore as bruises.

Her lungs twitch at every woman shape.

She eases her car into a parking slot close to the water. Wrestles off her seatbelt, shoves the door open against the wind and climbs out, her fingers clammy and stiff. She zips up her long puffy coat, flips up the hood, tugs the strings to tighten it in place. Raw wind blasts in off the water, slaps her hair out of her face. It reddens her cheeks. Numbs her nostrils. Tightens the wetted skin of her lips. She pockets her hands.

She hurries on uneasy feet to a bench.

Scintillation happens in the corner of her vision and her head jerks at it; she narrows her eyes at a long woman with long blonde hair in a long black coat stepping down the stairs of an upscale seafood restaurant.

She’s alone, Kate studies her like she’s a crime unfolding in real time: the body is young and lean and supple as a willow, her hair a sheaf of cornsilk pulled apart by the wind, her white face bent toward the ground, her muscular stride preoccupied.

Kate’s jaws ache. Her teeth chatter. Her eyes brim with burning tears.

The woman---an elegant, dynamic crime scene---turns her back on the harbor. She ascends the sidewalk, the heels of her oxblood boots landing crisp blows in the hollow whisper of the wind.

Kate’s breath rushes out.

The woman palms hair out of her face and one narrow gloved hand slips into a coat pocket.

Kate deflates over a heavy wallop of nausea; she gags and hugs her herself tight, her nose running and her throat spasming, teardrops darkening the worn pavement between her knees.

A horn beeps. The headlights of a sleek dark blue sedan flash twice.

In the distance between her heart's frantic rabbit-thump and the noose on her breath, Kate hears the sedan’s foreign engine hum itself into life.

_I can’t imagine Miles at twelve, I don't want to see him that young and when I search my mind, when I try to force such theater, I can find no room for it._

Her fingers twist and pull bunches of satin cloth. Her ribcage trembles. Her mouth aches. The tendons in her hands jitter and pop.

 _I can’t put Miles and softness together, he’s too wire-sharp and wire-cold---there’s something in the way he carries himself, in the way he possesses the space given to his body, that’s like biting down on an electric current---and I want to, I_ need _to._

She squeezes her eyes shut, chokes out wretched guttural muffled sobs until her hands freeze, her face cramps, and her eyes fill with silt.

_And it's my utter humiliation, my deep moral failing, but I just...can’t._

“It h-hurts too much,” she whispers.

_Every woman I see here makes me want to kill._

Her sinuses bloat, her whole head pulsing with blinding pain.

_To use my hands, to rip into soft saggy white skin with jagged nails and envision biting down. Yanking. Releasing a flood of blood to run riot down these streets. Every woman I see here makes me turn into a wolf. Fills me with the dirty urge to use my teeth on a living throat._

Tears glaze her cheeks. The wind rubs the salt of them in, turns her skin raw.

_But---every woman I see here makes me yearn to turn that snarling urge on myself, to break my own bones and disjoint my torso and turn my own teeth loose on the skin of my own ankle. I want to chew my way through, dig past tendon and muscle, gnaw the cartilage holding those tiny bones together._

Her stomach twists itself up into a vicious knot.

 _I would pay a king’s ransom in red iron, carry the ranting pain of a phantom limb all the way to the grave. Peel off my own skin. Suck my own marrow. I’d perform any violence necessary, offer up any sacrifice demanded, to free my foot from that most horrid of fates: the unthinkable---perhaps inevitable---trap of_ being _Elizabeth._

Kate folds in half, yanks the hem of her coat up with both hands. She vomits.

_Am I Elizabeth?_

She weeps and gags, shivers, coughs so hard that glitchy black flowers bloom in her vision.

_Am I?_

She clutches her coat, spits up long splattering strings of thick bile.

“Ma’am...excuse me?”

Kate startles and her spine shoots up straight, her head whipping around; she squints into the cloudy sky and finds the chubby earnest face of a young server hanging over her. She’s wearing jeans and a scoop-neck sweater, a dark blue apron still tied around her waist; her hair is short, spiky, aubergine.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m---” Kate’s voice shakes and she rubs the sleeves of her coat across her cheeks. “I’m sorry, I’m...” She covers her mouth, coughs. “I’m okay.” She sniffles. “I’ll be fine, I just need a minute.”

“Yeah, look…” Her diamond nose ring glitters in the weak light. “I just went on break?” She half-turns, gestures at the building behind her. “I was on my way over here to have a smoke and I saw you.” The hint of a dimple hovers near the corner of her thin but shapely mouth. “It looked like you might need some help?”

“I’m all right, I’m just…” Kate utters a wry little chuckle, shakes her head. She looks up. “Having a bad day.”

“I guess so.” The young woman pulls a handful of napkins out of her apron. “Go big or go home, right?” She holds them out. “Here.”

“Thank you.” Kate glances at her small gold name tag. “Millicent.”

“Oh shit.” Millicent mimes a jump-scare and grins, claps a hand over the name tag. She glances around. “Forgot about that, for a split-second I was like...what witchery is this, oh strange lady?”

Kate laughs, crumples up a napkin. “I dunno.” She swipes at her eyes with it. “Customer service witchery?”

Millicent’s voice brightens. “You mind if I sit?”

“No.” Kate shakes her head. “Not at all.”

Millicent sits next to her and fishes a pack of Marlboro reds out of her pocket. “You don’t care if I smoke, do you?”

“Nope.” Kate blows her nose, stuffs the napkin in her coat pocket. She holds up a hand, shakes her head. She chuckles. “I wouldn’t dream of coming between a lady and her nicotine.”

Millicent giggles. She arches an eyebrow, offers the pack. “Want one?”

“Oh Lord,” Kate sighs. “I haven’t smoked in...well, years. Almost decades.” She looks at the pack. “So...yes, of course.” She laughs, shakes her head. “I’d love one.”

“Hey man some days are just like that.” Millicent shrugs, watches Kate pluck a cigarette out of the pack. “Now.” She fishes a lighter out of her pocket, passes it over. “You want to talk about the kind of thing that makes a woman bawl their eyes out on a park bench in downtown Bar Harbor on a cold-ass shitty day like this one?”

Kate tucks the cigarette between her lips, flicks the lighter.

The wind snuffs it out.

Millicent scoots closer. Kate tries the lighter a second time and Millicent cups her hands around the flame; the wind ruffles Millicent’s spiky purple hair, tugs out a whiff of perfume. Kate inhales through her nose and it’s bright and crisp, warmed underneath by a subtle musk, fresh as a scattering of lavender blossoms. She glances at Millicent’s profile. The new flame pops up, twists and turns, sputters. It flattens beneath an errant downward gust.

“It’s a bitch out here, I know.” Millicent makes brief eye contact with her and changes the shapes of her hands. “This wind, she is not our friend.”

Kate cranes her neck, pushes the tip of the cigarette into the jittering flame. She pulls a wisp of harsh smoke up the length of her tongue, holds it in her mouth. Her eyes water. She breathes it out through her nostrils; her lungs spasm, the taste is sharp and burning and bitter, it singes on its way out and smothers the scent of Millicent’s hair in a blanket of ash. She coughs.

“How’s that?” Millicent lights her own cigarette. Smoke jets out of her nostrils. She smiles and her one dimple digs deep into her cheek. “Do it turn the trick for ya?”

“Oh my God.” Kate’s voice is tinged with sarcastic wonder. “It’s so foul.” She starts to laugh. “I’d forgotten.” She holds up the cigarette. Looks at it. Flicks loose ash off the end. She shakes her head. “God this is a terrible habit.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Millicent chuckles. “It’s pretty gross.” She takes another pull. “Expensive, too.” Smoke leaks out of her mouth. “Be glad you managed to shake yourself free of the habit.”

Kate nods and pulls in another mouthful of smoke. It burns her throat, numbs her tonsils.

Millicent watches the water. “You live around here?”

Kate blows out a long plume of smoke. “Yeah, I’m up in the Gouldsboro area.” She leans over, props her upper body with her forearms. The cigarette dangles ember-down between her fingers. She glances at Millicent. “I’m not from here, though.”

“Yeah, I could tell that.” Millicent huffs a gentle laugh. “I grew up around here and I can sniff out a flatlander from twenty miles away.” She lifts her chin, nods at Kate. “You come up from Mass? Or New York?”

“Ding ding.” Kate’s voice is wry. “Second one wins.” She brings the cigarette to her lips. “I was born in Brooklyn but moved upstate when I was a kid.”

“So what brought you all the way up here?”

“Work.” Kate straightens. “I got a...a-a really great job, excellent pay.” Her mouth slants and her eyebrows twitch upward. “You know.” She tilts her head, shrugs. “It’s that story.”

Millicent’s mouth bends into a contemplative shape. She makes a brief so-so gesture with her head, then nods.

“I’m on my way to Bangor to pick up a birthday gift and thought I’d…” Kate pauses for more smoke, lets it settle deeper in her throat. She closes her eyes. Savors the burn and how it stings her eyes, the bitter soot taste, her jittering little spasms of nausea. “Detour.” She opens her eyes, breathes out, glances up at the sky. Her voice is flat. “Some bad shit happened here.”

“Hence the heaping helping of tears with a side of fresh puke?”

Kate chuckles, nods. She glances at the splattered pavement, flicks ash on it. “Yeah.”

“Because puking makes everything better.”

“Well.” Kate laughs. “That’s a fresh take.”

“I will have you know that I am fresh as fuck.”

Kate giggles.

“You can take it to the bank.”

“I just…” Kate sighs. “I spend so much time afraid of being a bad person, you know.” A buoy clangs somewhere, hollowed-out and mournful, a sound thinned by distance. “The bad guy.” She takes a drag. “Like everything I do, every decision I make, is only going to make things worse.”

“Okay.” Millicent nods. “I can ride with that.”

“I guess it’s a pretty universal fear, huh?”

“I guess it is.”

Kate stubs out what’s left of the cigarette. “Thanks for the light.”

“No problemo.” Millicent grins. “What can I say, I’ve got a huge soft spot for damsels in distress.”

“This damsel says thank you.” Kate sidesteps the puddle of puke. “Talking to someone...it kind of helped?”

“Proud to serve.” Millicent loosens the ember, lets it drop. She stomps it out. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Kate.” She offers her hand. “It’s been nice.”

“Next time you’re in town, stop by.” Millicent tilts her head toward the restaurant. “If’ I happen to be on shift, I’ll share my discount with you.” She slips the remainder of her cigarette back into the pack. “Lucky for you, I’m on shift most days...so.”

“Maybe I will.” Kate drops her hand, stuffs both hands into her pockets. “I may just do that.”

“Bring a friend.” Millicent stands, brushes off the backs of her thighs. “Hell, bring two. We’ll make it a party.”

“Well…” Kate laughs. “I should go, daylight is burning and all that. Thanks again, for your time.”

“De nada. Drive safe, okay?”

“I will.” Kate watches her cross the street. “I promise.”

Millicent turns around at the door, points at her. “And no more puking!”

“Agreed!” Kate chuckles, waves. “I totally pinky swear.”

Millicent gives a thumbs up, disappears into the restaurant.

Kate hastens to her car. The wind comes up, heavy with salt and a cold scent of seaweed. She climbs in, shuts the door, buckles her belt. Far out over the water, clouds tatter themselves apart. Faded blue seeps through, brings with it a fragile golden light.

Kate slides the key home, starts the engine. She turns the heat up and roots around in the glove box for a stray piece of chewing gum; the rumble of the engine seeps up through the worn leather, soothes her chilled hamstrings.

She glances in the rearview.

In the merciless light, her face becomes the victim of a grieving, like she’s been on a week-long bender and woke up on a park bench somewhere: her eyes are bloodshot, the lashes red-rimmed, her eyelids puffy; pink lines mark where tears eroded the skin. Her mouth is swollen and shiny as a wound. The rims of her nostrils look flayed.

“Goddamn.”

She sighs, shifts into first, pulls away from the curb.

Turns around.

Heads inland.


	16. november 13, 1994

_November 13, 1994_

_Dear Miles,_

_I hope today was everything you wanted it to be._

_I hope you weren’t hurt that I left before you woke up, or that I stayed away until after your special supper; participating in your family rituals felt wrong, like an imposition. I’m an employee of the estate, and a new one at that. I haven’t even lived here a year. As such, I thought it inappropriate---and I felt it presumptuous---to assume that you’d want me here with you._

_So I thought I’d leave you alone with your family for the day, and I brought you these instead._

[on the floor beside the door rests a shimmery silver box big enough to hold a book set, or a tennis racket, or a folded garment; it’s cross-hatched with red velvet ribbon that’s been hand-tied into a big floppy bow---on top, nestled close to the bow, rests a much smaller box and this one is gilded gold, the right size for a handful of cassette tapes or a fancy watch from a jewelry store or a paperweight---the ribbon on this one is deep green and tied so it looks like a blooming flower, it’s a color like woodland sunlight in high summer and just as filmy]

_I hope you enjoy them._

_If I hurt you with my absence, I’m sorry. I never meant to._

_Happy birthday._

_Love,_

_Kate_


End file.
